All of this was done without the slightest trace of hurry.
Diogenes put the spoon carefully aside and lifted the glass to his lips, savoring the faintly bitter taste. He screwed the cap back on the flask and returned it to his pocket. It was the only modern absinthe he had found that had the same high proportion of essences of wormwood as the old nineteenth-century brands. As such, it deserved to be drunk in the traditional manner.
He took another sip, settling back comfortably into the chair. What was it Oscar Wilde had said of drinking absinthe? “The first stage is like ordinary drinking, the second when you begin to see monstrous and cruel things, but if you can persevere you will enter in upon the third stage, where you see things that you want to see, wonderful curious things.”
Strange how, no matter how much he drank, Diogenes never seemed to get past the second stage-nor did he particularly care to.
A small speaker set high up in the wall came to life.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is the conductor speaking. Welcome aboard the Lake Champlain, making stops at Yonkers, Cold Spring, Poughkeepsie, Albany, Saratoga Springs, Plattsburg, St.-Lambert, and Montreal. This is your final boarding call. All visitors, please exit the train at this time…
Listening, Diogenes smiled faintly. The Lake Champlain was one of only two luxury passenger trains still operated by Amtrak. By taking two adjoining first-class bedrooms and having the partition between them unlocked, Diogenes had secured himself a passably comfortable suite. It was a criminal disgrace the way politicians had allowed America’s passenger train system, once the envy of the world, to fall into insolvency and disrepair. But this, too, was but a passing inconvenience: he would soon be back in Europe, where people understood how to travel in dignity and comfort.
Outside the window, a heavyset woman wobbled quickly by, a porter burdened down with suitcases trotting in her wake. Diogenes held up his glass, stirring the pearly liquid gently. The train would depart within moments. And now for the first time-cautiously, like a man approaching a dangerous animal-he allowed himself a brief moment of reflection.
It was almost too dreadful to contemplate. Fifteen years of planning, careful disguise, artful intrigue, ingenious contrivance… all for naught. The thought of all the work and time he had put into Menzies alone-fashioning his backstory, learning his trade, obtaining employment, working for years and years, attending vapid meetings and listening to the asinine mutterings of desiccated curators-was almost enough to send him spiraling into a pit of madness. And then there was the final extravaganza, in all its intricate and fearsome glory: the meticulous medical research into how one could contrive to transform ordinary people into murderous sociopaths using nothing more than sound and light-the ablation of the inhibitory cerebral pathway by laser light, traumatizing the entorhinal cortex and amygdala and allowing for disinhibition of rudimentary function… And then, there had been the painstaking implementation of his own special sound-and-light show hidden within the multimedia presentation everybody else had slaved over-and the testing of it on the technician and that ass, Wicherly…
It had all been so perfect. Even the tomb’s curse, which he’d exploited so beautifully, added an exquisite touch: softening people up, preparing them psychologically for the terror of his sound-and-light show. It would have worked. In fact, it did work-except for the one element he could never have predicted: his brother escaping from Herkmoor. How had he managed that? And then he had appeared on the scene just in time to once again ruin everything.
How very like Aloysius. Aloysius, who-as the less gifted brother-had always taken grim pleasure in tearing down those things he himself lovingly constructed. Aloysius who, realizing he would always be bested intellectually, had taken the ultimate step of subjecting him to an Event that would ensure…
But here the hand holding the glass began to shake, and Diogenes immediately shut down this line of thought. Never mind: he would leave his brother one more gift for the delectation of his conscience: the gruesome death of Margo Green.
There was a hiss of brakes; another announcement from the conductor; and then, with a squealing of metal wheels, the train began to creep forward along the platform. He was on his way: Cold Spring, Canada, Europe, and home.
Home. Just the thought of being back in his library, among his treasured possessions, within the embrace of a structure lovingly designed to spoil his every whim, helped restore his equanimity. It was from home that, over many years, he’d planned his perfect crime. From there he could do it again. He was still relatively young. He had many years left, more than enough to develop a plan-a better plan.
He took a deeper sip of absinthe. In his rage and shock, he was forgetting something. He had succeeded, at least in part. He had hurt his brother terribly. Aloysius had been publicly humiliated, charged with the murders of his own friends, sent to prison. He might be free, temporarily, but he was still a wanted man: the prison break would only deepen the hole he was in. He could never rest, never take an easy breath. He would be hunted endlessly. For somebody so private, the prison ordeal must have been mortifying.
Yes, he had accomplished much. He had struck his brother in a most vital, most sensitive spot. While Aloysius had been languishing in prison, he had seduced his brother’s ward. What an abominable, delicious pleasure it had been. Remarkable: a hundred years of childhood… and yet still so fresh, so innocent and naive. Every web he had spun, every cynical lie he had told, had been a joy: especially his long and windy disquisitions on color. She would be dead by now, lying in a pool of her own blood. Yes, murder was one thing: but suicide, genuine suicide, struck the hardest blow of all.
He took another slow sip and watched the platform glide by over the rim of the glass. He was approaching Oscar Wilde’s second stage of absinthe drinking, the contemplation of monstrous and cruel things-and he wanted to hold in his mind, like a soothing balm, one particular image: his brother standing over the dead body of Constance, reading the letter. This was the image that would comfort, nourish, and sustain him until he reached home…
The door to his stateroom rolled back with a clatter. Diogenes sat up, smoothing his shirtfront and slipping a hand into his jacket pocket for the ticket. But it was not the conductor who stood in the corridor beyond: it was the frail old woman he had seen walk past on the platform a few minutes earlier.
He frowned. “This is a private room,” he said in a clipped tone.
The woman did not answer. Instead, she took a step forward into the compartment.
Instantly, Diogenes grew alarmed. It was nothing he could immediately put his finger on, but some sixth sense abruptly screamed danger. And then, as the woman reached into her handbag, he realized what it was: these were no longer the slow, hesitant movements of an old lady. They were lithe and quick-and they seemed to have a dreadful purpose. But before he could move, the hand came out of the bag holding a gun.
Diogenes froze. The gun was ancient, practically a relic: dirty, webbed with rust. Almost against his will, Diogenes found his eyes traveling up the woman’s form until they reached her face-and he recognized the bottomless, expressionless eyes that looked back at him from beneath the wig. Recognized them well.
The barrel rose toward him.
Diogenes leaped to his feet, absinthe sloshing over his shirt and spattering the front of his pants, and flung himself backward as she squeezed the trigger.
Nothing.
Diogenes straightened, heart beating madly. It dawned on him that she had never fired a weapon before-she did not know how to aim, she had not yet turned off the safety. He sprang at her, but even as he did so, he heard the click of a safety being released, and a shattering explosion filled the compartment. A bullet punched a hole in the skin of the train car above his head as he twisted and fell sideways.
He scrambled to his feet as the woman took a step forward, wraithlike in the billows of cordite and dust. Once again-with perfect, terrible composure-she leveled the gun, took aim.
Diogenes threw himself at the door to the adjoining compartment, only to find that the porter had not yet unlocked it.
Another deafening explosion, and splinters flew from the molding mere inches from his ear.
He turned around to face her, his back against the window. Perhaps he could rush her, knock her from the door… But once again, with a deliberation so slow it was unspeakably awful, she leveled the old pistol, took aim.
He jerked to one side as a third bullet shattered the window where just a moment before he had been standing. As the echoes of the shot died away, the clank of the train wheels drifted in. There were shouts and screams in the corridor of the train now. Outside, the end of the platform was in sight. Even if he overcame her,
