Two Graves

tugging at his suit and stirring his pale blond hair. Dry leaves skittered along the pavement and blew around the house as the heavy oaken door opened to swallow his dark figure.

Winding his way swiftly through the dim corridors, Pendergast reached the library. It remained untidy, the refectory table stacked with papers, spilling to the floor. The section of bookcases revealing the flat-panel remained open. He moved briskly to the rear of the library, where a swift flick of his wrist at some invisible mechanism caused another section of shelves to swing open, revealing a small work space with computer and monitor. Without bothering to sit down, Pendergast began typing on the keyboard, the screen leaping to life. He pulled a compact disk out of the manila folder, scattering papers in his haste. He fed the CD into the computer and rapped out additional commands, reaching a log-in screen. When he filled out the password, a stark black-and-white welcome page came into view:

DOCTOR’S TRIAL GROUP

mtDNA DATABASE

Homo sapiens haplogroup mitochondrion

Polymorphisms and mutations

THIS IS A CONFIDENTIAL DATABASE.

UNAUTHORIZED USE STRICTLY FORBIDDEN.

More machine-gun typing followed, and then the screen displayed a rotating wheel. A moment later a single, small result popped into view. Pendergast, still standing, stared at the result for a full five seconds—and then he staggered. Stepping backward, he wobbled for a moment, then dropped unceremoniously to his knees.

27

SPECIAL AGENT PENDERGAST ENTERED HIS DAKOTA apartment and walked into the reception room. There he paused, irresolutely, listening to the whisper of water over stone. After a moment, he stepped over to a small Monet painting and straightened it, back and forth, although it was already perfectly aligned against the rose- colored wall. Next, he moved to a twisted bonsai tree, picked up a tiny pair of hand-forged clippers that lay on the table beside it, and carefully snipped off a few new shoots of growth. His hand trembled slightly as he did so.

That done, he paced the room restlessly, pausing to rearrange the lotus petals that floated in the base of the fountain.

He had something he must do, but the prospect of doing it was almost unbearable.

Finally, he stepped over to the flush door that led into the apartment proper. Opening it, he walked down the length of hallway, passing a number of doors. He nodded to Miss Ishimura, who was resting in her sitting room, reading a book in Japanese, and soon reached the end of the corridor, where the hallway made a ninety-degree turn to the right. Pendergast opened the first door to the left after the turn and stepped into the room beyond.

The walls on either side were lined floor-to-ceiling with recessed mahogany bookshelves, each filled with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century leather-bound books. The wall before him was taken up by a deep window embrasure of polished mahogany, with two banquette seats facing each other, fitted with plush cushions. Between these lay a large picture window overlooking the intersection of Central Park West and Seventy-Second Street. Beyond lay the broad vastness of Central Park, its trees bare and stark in the winter sun.

He closed his eyes, let his body relax, and carefully regulated his breathing. Slowly, outside existence began to fall away; first the room, then the apartment, the building, the island, then the world itself, in an ever-widening circle of orchestrated oblivion. The process took fifteen minutes to complete. When it was done, he held himself suspended in the close darkness, waiting for absolute emptiness, absolute calm. When he had achieved it, he slowly opened his eyes—not physically, but mentally—slowly, slowly.

The small room was revealed in all its detailed perfection. But it remained empty.

Pendergast did not allow himself the luxury of surprise. He was highly skilled in the art of Chongg Ran, an ancient Himalayan mental discipline that he had taken years to master. It was rare for him to fail to achieve stong pa nyid—the State of Pure Emptiness. Clearly, there was resistance lurking somewhere in his mind.

He would need to take more time—much more time.

Once again, he regulated his breathing, allowing his heart rate to slow to forty beats a minute. He let his mind go blank, to still the inner voice, to let go of his hopes and desires, to forget even his purpose in coming to this room. For a long moment, he lingered again, weightless, in empty space. Then—infinitely more slowly this time—he began building a perfect model of Manhattan Island in his mind, starting with his apartment and moving outward. He went first room by room, then building by building, and then—with loving attention—block by block. Pendergast knew the topography of Manhattan as well as any living person, and he allowed himself to linger on every structure, every intersection, every obscure point of architectural interest, in a harmonious mental braid of memory and reconstruction, assembling every detail into a whole and holding it, in its entirety, in his mind. Step by step the great mental construction was made, expanding until it was bordered by the Hudson River to the west and the Harlem River to the east, Battery Park in the south and Spuyten Duyvil in the north. For a long, long moment he held the entire island in his head, its every feature existing simultaneously with every other in his mental reconstruction. And then—after assuring himself of its perfection—he vaporized it in a one-second flick of the mind. Vanished. Extinguished. Nothing remained but darkness.

Now, in his mind, he opened his eyes again. Five hours had passed. And Helen Esterhazy Pendergast was sitting in the window seat across from him. Of all the rooms in the Dakota apartment, this had been Helen’s favorite. She had not been especially fond of New York, and this tiny den—cozy with books and the smell of polished wood, the view of Central Park spread out before it—had been her particular retreat.

Of course, Helen was not there in the literal sense; but in every other way she existed: everything in Pendergast’s mind that touched on her, every memory, every tiny detail, was part of that mental construct, so much so that she could be said to have assumed a quasi-autonomous existence.

Such was the beauty and power of Chongg Ran.

Helen’s hands were folded in her lap, and she was wearing a dress he well remembered—black satin, with pale coral-colored stitching traced along the low neckline. She was younger—about the age she had been at the time of the hunting accident.

Accident. The irony of it was that it had been an accident—only not in the way he’d believed these many years.

“Helen,” he said.

Her eyes rose to meet his briefly. She smiled and then looked down again. The smile caused him to flinch in pain and grief; and the scene wavered and almost flew apart. He waited until it stabilized, until his heart slowed back down.

“There is a serial killer loose in the city,” he said. He could hear the quaver in his own voice, along with a formal tone uncharacteristic of his usual exchanges with his wife. “He has killed three times. Each time, he left a message. The second message was Happy Birthday.”

There was a silence.

“This second killing took place on my birthday. Because of that—and certain other elements of the murders—I began to suspect they were the work of my brother, Diogenes. This seemed to be confirmed when I compared my DNA with that of the killer and learned that we were, in fact, closely related. Close enough to be brother-to-brother.”

He stopped, checking to see the impact these words were having on his wife. But she continued to look down at the hands clasped in her lap.

“But now I’ve had a look at the mtDNA results as well. And they’ve shown me something else. The killer isn’t related to me alone. He’s also related to you.”

Helen looked up. She either could not, or would not, speak.