order. And Pendergast was nowhere to be found.
CHAPTER 44
ANOTHER TOMATO JUICE, SIR?”
“No, thank you. There will be nothing else.”
“Very good.” And the cabin steward continued making her way down the plane’s central aisle.
In the first-class compartment, Pendergast examined the yellowing document he had — after hours of exhaustive and exhausting search — finally retrieved from the queerest place: rolled up inside an old rifle barrel, proving once again how little he really knew his wife. His eye traveled once again down the document.
Helen von Fuchs Esterhazy
Helen had been born in Brazil — in a place called Nova Godoi. Nova Godoi—
Mime had said Helen’s native language was Portuguese. Now it made sense.
Brazil. Pendergast thought for a moment. Helen had spent almost five months in Brazil before they were married, on a mission with Doctors With Wings. Or at least that was what she had said at the time. As he’d learned the hard way, no assumption about Helen was safe.
He glanced again at the birth certificate. At the very bottom was a box labeled OBSERVACOES/A VERBACOES — observations/annotations. He looked at it closely, and then removed a small magnifying glass from his pocket to examine it further.
Whatever had been in this box had not merely been blacked out: the paper itself had been excised and painstakingly replaced with an unmarked piece of paper with the same engraved background pattern, microscopically stitched together with the utmost craft. It was an exceedingly professional piece of work.
He finally accepted, at that moment, that he truly had not known his beloved wife. Like so many other fallible human beings, he had been blinded by love. He had not even begun to crack the ultimate mystery of her identity.
With care bordering on reverence, he refolded the birth certificate and placed it deep in a suit pocket.
CHAPTER 45
DR. JOHN FELDER SLOWLY CLIMBED THE STAIRS of the Forty-Second Street branch of the New York Public Library. It was late afternoon, and the broad steps were busy with students and camera-wielding tourists. Felder ignored them, passing between the marble lions that guarded the Beaux-Arts facade and pushing his way into the echoing entrance hall.
For years, Felder had used this main branch of the library as a kind of retreat. He loved the way it mixed a sense of elegance and wealth with scholarly research. He’d grown up bookish and poor, the son of a dry-goods salesman and a public-school teacher, and this had always been his haven away from the commotion of Jewel Avenue. Even now, with all the research materials available to him at the Department of Health, he nevertheless found himself returning to the library again and again. Just entering its book-perfumed confines was a comforting act, leaving the squalid world behind for a better place.
Except for today. Today felt different, somehow.
He climbed the two flights of stairs to the Main Reading Room and made the long walk past dozens of long oaken tables to a far corner. Setting his case down on the scarred wooden surface, he pulled a nearby keyboard to him, then paused.
It had been half a year, roughly, since he’d first become involved with the case of Constance Greene. Originally it had been routine: another court-appointed interview with a criminal psychiatric patient. But it had quickly become more than that. She had been like no other patient he’d encountered. He’d found himself mystified, perplexed, intrigued — and aroused.
And it was into this strange tinderbox of emotion that Dr. Ernest Poole had just intruded. Felder was aware his feelings about Poole were mixed. He felt a certain proprietary interest in Constance, and the idea that another psychiatrist had previously studied her was oddly annoying. Yet Poole’s own experience with Constance — quite unlike his own, apparently — promised perhaps the best chance yet of penetrating her mysteries. The fact that Poole’s clinical evaluations were so different was both perplexing and encouraging. It could offer a uniquely three- dimensional vantage onto what would be — he felt increasingly certain — the case study of his career.
He put his fingers on the keyboard and paused again.
Typing quickly, he brought up the library’s database of periodicals. He would make one last search, this time of the
He moved the cursor down to the “search parameters” field, then paused, consulting his notes.
He would search for three items: Greene, Water Street, and Leng. But he knew from past experience he’d better keep the terms of the search vague — scanned newspapers were notorious for typos. So he’d create a regular expression, using a logical AND query.
Typing once again, he entered the SQL-like search conditions:
SELECT WHERE (match) = = ‘Green*’ && ‘Wat* St*’ && ‘Leng*’
Almost immediately, he got a response. There was a single hit: a three-year-old article in
Newly-Discovered Letter Sheds Light on 19th-Century Killings