The Cabinet of Curiosities

“He helped her with her potions and charms and frightful little stick dolls and making marks on graves. Then there was that unpleasantness with her tomb, after she died . . .”

“Unpleasantness?”

The old woman sighed, lowered her head. “The interference with her grave, the violated body and all those dreadful little cuts. Of course you must know that story.”

“I’ve forgotten.” Pendergast’s voice was soft, gentle, probing.

“He believed he was going to bring her back to life. There was the question of whether she had put him up to it before she died, charged him with some kind of dreadful after-death assignment. The missing pieces of flesh were never found, not a one. No, that’s not quite right. I believe they found an ear in the belly of an alligator caught a week later out of the swamp. The earring gave it away, of course.” Her voice trailed off. She turned to one of the attendants, and spoke in a tone of cold command. “My hair needs attention.”

One of the attendants—the one wearing surgical gloves—came over and gingerly patted the woman’s hair back into place, keeping a wary distance.

She turned back to Pendergast.

“She had a kind of sexual hold over him, as dreadful as that sounds, considering the sixty-year difference in their ages.” The old lady shuddered, half in disgust, half in pleasure. “Clearly, she encouraged his interest in reincarnation, miracle cures, silly things like that.”

“What did you hear about his disappearance?”

“It happened at the age of twenty-one, when he came into his fortune. But ‘disappearance’ really isn’t quite the word, you know: he was asked to leave the house. At least, so I’ve been told. He’d begun to talk about saving, healing the world—making up for what his father had done, I suppose—but that cut no mustard with the rest of the family. Years later, when his cousins tried to track down the money he’d inherited and taken with him, he seemed to have vanished into thin air. They were terribly disappointed. It was so very much money, you see.”

Pendergast nodded. There was a long silence.

“I have one final question for you, Aunt Cornelia.”

“What is it?”

“It is a moral question.”

“A moral question. How curious. Is this connected by any chance with Great-Uncle Antoine?”

Pendergast did not answer directly. “For the past month, I have been searching for a man. This man is in possession of a secret. I am very close to discovering his whereabouts, and it is only a matter of time until I confront him.”

The old woman said nothing.

“If I win the confrontation—which is by no means certain—I may be faced with the question of what to do with his secret. I may be called upon to make a decision that will have, possibly, a profound effect on the future of the human race.”

“And what is this secret?”

Pendergast lowered his voice to the merest ghost of a whisper.

“I believe it is a medical formula that will allow anyone, by following a certain regimen, to extend his life by at least a century, perhaps more. It will not vanquish death, but it will significantly postpone it.”

There was a silence. The old lady’s eyes gleamed anew. “Tell me, how much will this treatment cost? Will it be cheap, or dear?”

“I don’t know.”

“And how many others will have access to this formula besides yourself?”

“I’ll be the only one. I’ll have very little time, maybe only seconds after it comes into my hands, to decide what to do with it.”

The silence stretched on into minutes. “And how was this formula developed?”

“Suffice to say, it cost the lives of many innocent people. In a singularly cruel fashion.”

“That adds a further dimension to the problem. However, the answer is quite clear. When this formula comes into your possession, you must destroy it immediately.”

Pendergast looked at her curiously. “Are you quite sure? It’s what medical science has most desired since the beginning.”

“There is an old French curse: may your fondest wish come true. If this treatment is cheap and available to everyone, it will destroy the earth through overpopulation. If it is dear and available only to the very rich, it will cause riots, wars, a breakdown of the social contract. Either way, it will lead directly to human misery. What is the value of a long life, when it is lived in squalor and unhappiness?”

“What about the immeasurable increase in wisdom that this discovery will bring, when you consider the one, maybe two hundred years, of additional learning and study it will afford the brilliant mind? Think, Aunt Cornelia, of what someone like Goethe or Copernicus or Einstein could have done for humanity with a two-hundred-year life span.”

The old woman scoffed. “The wise and good are outnumbered a thousand to one by the brutal and stupid. When you give an Einstein two centuries to perfect his science, you give a thousand others two centuries to perfect their brutality.”

This time, the silence seemed to stretch into minutes. By the door, Dr. Ostrom stirred restlessly.

“Are you all right, my dear?” the old lady asked, looking intently at Pendergast.

“Yes.”