Page 41 of Angel of Vengeance
He paused to catch his breath, sitting on one of the steps and unbuttoning the top of his policeman’s overcoat. The moonlight, which had not deserted him during the last half hour, shone not only through the tall narrow windows, but also faintly through the cracks in a rectangular shape in the heavily braced ceiling. This, he realized, was the opening to the unfinished viewing parapet. Placing his palms against it, he dislodged it, then hoisted himself up onto the surface.
On the roof, there were not yet railings or posts of any kind: each side of the wooden square dropped off into darkness. Diogenes approached the south edge. He did not suffer from vertigo, but he nevertheless braced himself against the wind gusts that came and went at this height, which he estimated to be one hundred and seventy-five feet above ground.
As he raised his glance from the supporting platform and looked out over the city, he forgot all about the wind. There, below him, was the heart of Manhattan. Directly under his feet, where Central Park met a line of new apartment buildings and hotels, was the “Grand Circle” that, in ten more years, would host a statue of Christopher Columbus. Beyond it, Broadway ran crookedly south, breaking the otherwise neat grid of streets until it encountered the maze of alleys and lanes south of Houston. Despite the late hour, and the emptiness of the streets, faint sounds rose up to greet him: the nicker of a horse, a shout of laughter. The city was breathing, but it was a peaceful breathing… nothing like the garish cacophony of twenty-first-century New York. He could see countless twinkling lights, gas lamps illuminating the streets and margins of lower Manhattan with tiny jets of fire—but there were more, many more, that he could see only indirectly, shining within windows and from alleyways, and these gave the city a mysterious lambent glow, only increasing for Diogenes the sensation that he was staring down upon a living thing.
This was his new home—his domain. This was the place upon which he would make his mark. For all its technology, all its advances, the twenty-first century was sterile, insipid, and pitiless. It had been exceptionally cruel to him—and he to it. It was a flabby world, ruled by detumescent Babbitts, where ease had replaced vigor; a world nihilo ac malem.
He took a step back as this sudden, unexpected transport of emotion threatened to carry him over the edge. He stood still a moment, letting the strong wave of feeling pass and his breathing return to normal.
Now that everything was in place, he had only to attach fuses to each charge as he descended, each one of a length he’d already calculated. Not for the first time, he wondered why he was going for such overkill: the load beneath the roof was perfectly sufficient. But no: removing this excrescence in its entirety would be his opening gift—his housewarming present, so to speak—to 1881.
He slipped down into the tower, pulled the ceiling cover back into place, and picking up the dark lantern, descended the stairs one last time, uncoiling and attaching the fuses, ensuring that all his handiwork had been properly secreted away, before returning once again to the city.
His city.
35
ONCE AGAIN, THE DINGHY passed through the rustling weeds along the banks of the Hudson and into the hidden passageway, Constance silently dipping the oars. The lantern hung in the bow cast a dim light down the stone passageway as the boat eased forward, until finally the landing came into view. She steadied the boat against the stone quay, tied the painter to the bronze ring, and unloaded an oilskin duffel of fresh supplies. She stepped out herself and, slinging the bag over her shoulders, opened the hidden doorway and crept along the tunnel beyond, until she had passed under the Boston Post Road and entered the sub-basement of the Riverside Drive mansion.
Constance made her way to the blind she had chosen as a hiding place and set down her duffel. As she sank onto the crude cot, covered with a mattress of straw and canvas ticking, she had to force herself not to close her eyes. She hadn’t had a moment to think, or muse, since the night before.
She contemplated the small stone chamber that, almost two centuries earlier, had been the treasure room of the privateer king whose stronghold had been replaced, years earlier, by Leng’s mansion. The chamber, and most of the surrounding passages, had been carved out of the natural bedrock. The half dozen gold ducats and scattering of crude gemstones remaining in the cracks and corners led her to assume the pirate had vacated his lair in a hurry.
She’d intended to return here the night before, under cover of darkness, directly after the meeting with Diogenes and Aloysius. But she had been significantly delayed, and dawn was breaking by the time she exited the house in the Tenderloin district. Nevertheless, she’d put the day to good use. First, she’d stopped at a purveyor of gently used women’s clothing—well made, simple, but out of fashion—and used a dressing room there to change into a new outfit, leaving her brothel-style dress behind. She’d walked a mile along back alleyways before hailing a cab, which she directed to her town house on Fifth Avenue. She entered to the amazement of Féline, Gosnold, and the servants. This unexpected arrival, she hoped, would further confuse Leng and his spies regarding her comings and goings.
Once she had settled the household’s nerves with a combination of half-truths and lies, she retired with Féline to her private study. The young Frenchwoman was recovering well from her injuries, but she, like the others, was distressed by the current state of the house. Constance had no time to waste in commiseration; there were vital affairs to settle and little time to do it.
She explained her plans to Féline. The private secretary was aghast and pleaded with Constance to change her mind. Ultimately, however, she was forced to concede the logic behind her mistress’s intentions. Constance then sent her out to summon the lawyer with whom she had already done business. He arrived; Constance explained what she wanted, then overrode his protestations at the legal irregularity with the help of an extra-large fee. She waited while he drew up the paperwork, then reviewed and signed it, with Féline as witness. Lastly, she took Féline aside for a few final words, and they embraced.
By this time, it was dark. Constance donned black, close-fitting clothes, took up a small traveling satchel, and slipped out a basement window into the dim alleyway behind the house as quietly and invisibly as a cat.
She had made a show of her arrival, but she intended for her departure to remain unseen. Flitting westward from alley to alley, she ultimately gained the Hudson River and the shoreline weeds where she had hidden her dinghy. She rowed up the river, once again with the tide, to the pirate’s secret entrance.
Now, in the silent stone chamber, she gazed meditatively at the tallow candle whose guttering light illuminated her washbasin, the unopened satchel, a whetstone, and a dog-eared copy of the poems of Catullus. It was odd: when she’d returned to the past of her childhood, she had expected to be confronted by long-forgotten memories. What she had not anticipated were the specific things that would trigger them. This cheap candle, for instance—its gray-black smoke, coiling toward a small vent in the ceiling, just now resurrected a ghostly image of her mother, sprinkling salt on a candle precisely like this one in order to extend its burn time. It was the most ephemeral of memories, thin as gossamer and just as fragile.
Constance shook it away. Now was not the time to indulge in reminiscence. She rose up and, lighting a taper from the dying flame, moved out of the chamber into a clammy stone tunnel.
Leng had owned the mansion for only five years, but he was already filling the basement with a collection of weapons, torture devices, anatomical relics, poisons, chemical compounds, and other items of interest to his criminally curious mind and dark ambitions. She was in possession of a vital fact: in her world, at least, Leng would not discover the secret entrance to these caverns below the mansion’s basement complex for another thirty years. Constance, however, already knew them well. On her first arrival underneath the mansion, she had searched the basement and sub-basement with methodical precision, comparing this with her own memory of how it looked in her own present day, and within thirty-six hours she had learned, or refreshed her recollection, of all its secrets. Leng was already busy in the basement, setting up his collections and labs, and she had to be exceedingly careful to leave no trace whatsoever in those spaces. But she could spy on him through certain peepholes and masonry cracks, from the spaces between and inside the walls that honeycombed the rambling structure.
Her first effort had been to find Binky, but it quickly became clear (and was no surprise) that she was no longer in the house. Tracing where she had been taken was now Aloysius’s task. Constance was ready to move on to the next stage of her own plan: the one thing, she’d told the two brothers, that she would achieve—no matter what.
Quickly and stealthily, she made her way past false walls and up secret staircases through the basement and to the main floor, then up a narrow flight of disused back stairs and through a doorway whose outlines were hidden in the wallpaper. She tiptoed between beams, joists, and small piles of nogging, until she came to the inside wall of Leng’s library. There was a tiny hole five feet above the ground, hidden by a minuscule flap of loose plaster in the deepest shadows. She lifted the flap and looked through… to see the man himself, enjoying a glass of postprandial port.
She allowed herself only a split-second glimpse; she knew the doctor was not someone to take even the slightest chances with. But it was enough. That hateful image would carry her through the days of work that lay ahead.
“Te post me, satanas,” she whispered as she secured the tiny flap. Then she turned and slipped away, back down into the darkness, ready to prepare a beverage of her own.
36
CEDRIC DEDDINGTON-BUTE, FIFTH BARON Jayeaux, lay sprawled across the stylized reproduction of an Egyptian sarcophagus, circa 800 BC, carved out of lignum vitae. From the eiderdown bolsters cushioning his limbs, he gazed with satisfaction around his salon.
The real Cedric Deddington-Bute, newly arrived from Southampton, was now decomposing peacefully in the muck of the East River, and Diogenes had smoothly appropriated the man’s identity and worldly goods. To honor his memory, Diogenes had created this opulent nest with an extravagance that would have been impossible in the twenty-first century. The salon itself was decorated in the Etruscan style; the bath, Egyptian; the dining room, Roman Empire; and the bedroom, a mélange from the fevered minds of Huysmans and Baudelaire. Years ago, Diogenes had learned that money—when spent extravagantly—could spin straw into gold. At present, he had an enormous amount of money: with his knowledge of future market movements, he’d acquired an immense fortune on the New York Stock Exchange with astonishing speed and was now deploying it to his own gratification. It had been easy to do in this Gilded Age, when labor laws, OSHA, building codes, UNESCO conventions, and the Lacey Act remained far in the future.
The Etruscans had been famous for their skilled goldsmiths, who could coax gold to granulation and work it into intricate filigree. Nearly every inch of Diogenes’s salon—from the caryatids sculpted to look like living pillars, to the very jointure of the furniture—was covered in such Etruscan gilt. The drapes of the third-floor room were thrown wide, and the winter light that flooded in gave the natural sheen of every surface a brilliance. Thirty-Fourth Street lay outside the five-story town house he’d purchased, and he’d paid a great sum to have it immediately secured with iron bars, special locks, and soundproofing. There were other retrofittings he planned to make himself… when time permitted.
With a sigh of leisurely enjoyment, he looked over at the dish set beside his couch and the various fruits that lay upon it, glistening with tiny droplets of water. He quoted dreamily to no one in particular:
The silent man in mocha brown