Dance Of Death

I am very much preoccupied at present with various lines of research and study. But what, exactly? Diogenes certainly didn't say, and his brother was silent on the matter. Or almost silent. D'Agosta let his eye fall on a pile of news clippings. They had been taken from a variety of foreign magazines and newspapers. Each had been labeled with an attribution and a date, and those in foreign languages had translations attached-once again, Pendergast thinking ahead.

Most of these clippings dealt with unsolved crimes. There was an entire family in Lisbon, killed by botulism, yet without any trace of food found in their stomachs. A chemist at the University of Paris, Sorbonne, was discovered with radial arteries of both wrists severed and the body carefully exsanguinated. Yet there was no blood at the murder scene. Files on several of the chemist's experiments were found to be missing. Additional clippings described still other deaths, more grisly, in which the corpses seemed to have been victims of various tortures or experimentation-the bodies were too badly damaged to be certain. And yet other clippings were mere obituaries. There seemed to be no logic or pattern to the deaths, and Pendergast did not leave any commentary on what it was that he had found interesting.

D'Agosta picked up the pile, riffled through it. There was a variety of thefts, too. A pharmaceutical manufacturing company, reporting the robbery of a freezer full of experimental drugs. A collection of diamonds mysteriously vanished from a vault in Israel. A rare, fist-sized piece of amber containing a leaf from a long-extinct plant, lifted from a wealthy couple's apartment in Paris. A unique, polished T. rex coprolite, dating precisely from the K-T boundary.

He replaced the clippings on the table with a sigh.

Next his eye fell on a small sheaf of papers from Sandringham, a private school in the south of England that Diogenes attended-unknown to his family-to finish out his last year of upper school. He had managed to get himself accepted on the strength of several forged documents and a phony set of parents hired for the occasion. Despite a first- semester report card putting him in the first of every form, he was expelled a few months later. Judging from the paperwork, the school gave no reason for the expulsion and responded to Pendergast's queries with evasion, even agitation. Other papers showed that Pendergast had contacted a certain Brian Cooper on several occasions-Cooper had briefly been the roommate of Diogenes at Sandringham-but it seemed the boy refused to respond. A final letter from the youth's parents said Brian had been placed in an institution, where he was being treated for acute catatonia.

Following the expulsion, Diogenes slipped completely out of view for more than two years. And then he had surfaced to claim his inheritance. Four months later, he staged his own death in Canterbury.

After that, silence.

No-that wasn't quite true. There was one final communication. D'Agosta turned toward a folded sheet of heavy linen paper, sitting alone at one corner of the table. He reached for it, opened it thoughtfully. At the top was an embossed coat of arms, a lidless eye over two moons, a lion crouched beneath. And at the very center of the sheet was a date, written in violet ink with what D'Agosta now recognized as Diogenes's handwriting: January 28.

Inexorably, D'Agosta's mind returned once again to the October day when he'd first held the letter-here, in this room, on the eve of their departure to Italy. Pendergast had shown it to him and spoken briefly of Diogenes's plan to commit the perfect crime.

But D'Agosta had returned from Italy alone. And now it was up to him-and nobody else-to follow through for his dead partner, to stop the crime that presumably would occur on January 28.

Less than a week away.

He felt a rising panic; there was so little time left. The roommate at Sandringham: now, there was a lead. He'd call the parents tomorrow, see if the boy was talking. Even if he struck out there, undoubtedly there were other boys at the school who had known Diogenes.

D'Agosta folded the paper carefully and returned it to the table. Beside it lay a single black-and-white photograph, scuffed and creased with age. He picked it up, held it to the light. A man, a woman, and two young boys, standing before an elaborate wrought-iron railing. An imposing mansion could be seen in the middle distance. It was a warm day: the boys were in shorts, and the woman wore a summer dress. The man stared at the camera with a patrician face. The woman was beautiful, with light hair and a mysterious smile. The boys were perhaps eight and five. The elder stood straight, arms behind his back, looking gravely into the lens. His light blond hair was carefully parted, his clothes pressed. Something about the shape of the cheekbones, the aquiline features, told D'Agosta this was Agent Pendergast.

Beside him was a younger boy with ginger hair, hands pressed together, fingers pointed skyward, as if in prayer. Unlike his older sibling, Diogenes seemed faintly disheveled. But there was nothing in his dress or his grooming to account for this. Maybe it was something in the relaxed, almost languid draping of his limbs, so out of context with the chastely positioned hands. Maybe it was the parted lips, too full and sensual for a person so young. Both eyes looked the same- this must have been before the illness.

Still, D'Agosta was drawn to the eyes. They weren't looking at the camera, but at some point past it if they were looking at anything at all. They seemed dull, almost dead, out of place in that childish little face. D'Agosta felt an uncomfortable sensation in the pit of his stomach.

There was a rustle beside him and D'Agosta jumped. Constance Greene had suddenly materialized at his side. She seemed to have Pendergast's ability to approach with almost total silence.

'I'm sorry,' Constance said. 'I didn't mean to startle you.'

'No problem. Looking at all this stuff is enough to creep anyone out.'

'Excuse me. Creep out?'

'It's just an expression.'

'Have you found anything interesting? Anything at all?'

D'Agosta shook his head. 'Nothing we didn't talk about earlier.' He paused. 'The only thing is, I didn't see anything in here about Diogenes's illness. Scarlet fever, according to Aunt Cornelia. She said it changed him.'

'I wish there was more information I could give you. I've searched the collections and the family papers, just in case there was something Aloysius overlooked. But he was very thorough. There's nothing else.'

Nothing else. Diogenes's whereabouts, his appearance, his activities, even the crime he planned to commit: everything was a blank.

There was only a date-January 28. Next Monday.

'Maybe Pendergast was wrong,' D'Agosta said, trying to sound hopeful. 'About the date, I mean. Maybe it's not for another year. Or maybe it's something else entirely.' He gestured at the documents strewn across the table. 'All this seems so far away and long ago. It's hard to believe something big's about to happen.'

The only response from Constance was a faint, and fleeting, smile.

EIGHT

Lorace Sawtelle passed the oversize vellum menu back to the waiter with relief. He wished that once-just once-a client would come to him. He hated the sprawling concrete jungles they all worked in: Chicago, Detroit, and now New York. Once you got to know it, Keokuk wasn't so bad. He knew all the best watering holes and titty bars. Some of his clients might even develop a deep admiration for certain Iowan charms.

Across the table, his client was ordering something that sounded like cough-up of veal. Horace Sawtelle wondered if the man really knew what the hell he was asking for. He himself had scanned the menu, first one side and then the other, with deep misgivings. Handwritten French script, and unpronounceable at that. He'd settled on something called steak tartare. Hell, how bad could it be? Even the French couldn't ruin steak. And he liked tartar sauce on fish sticks.

'You don't mind if I glance through them once more before signing?' the client asked, holding up the sheaf of contracts.

Sawtelle nodded. 'You go right ahead.' Never mind that they'd spent the last two hours going over them with a damn magnifying glass. You'd think the guy was buying a million dollars' worth of Palm Beach real estate instead of fifty grand in machine parts.