The Cabinet of Curiosities

“Damn you, Bill,” she whispered, pressing his hand. “You’ve got to make it. You’ve got to.”

She waited, motionless beneath the lights, her eyes fixed on the monitors.

SEVEN

IN THE STONE CHAMBERS deep beneath 891 Riverside, the air smelled of dust, ancient fungus, and ammonia. Pendergast moved painfully through the darkness, lifting the hood from the lantern infrequently, as much to inspect Leng’s cabinet as to get his bearings. He paused, breathing hard, at the center of a room full of glass jars and specimen trays. He listened intently. His hyperacute ears picked up the sound of Fairhaven’s stealthy footsteps. They were at most one, perhaps two chambers away. There was so little time. He was gravely wounded, without a weapon, bleeding heavily. If he was to find any way to level the playing field, it would have to come from the cabinet itself. The only way to defeat Fairhaven was to understand Leng’s ultimate project—to understand why Leng had been prolonging his life.

He uncovered the lantern again and examined the cabinet in front of him. The jars contained dried insects, shimmering with iridescence in the beam of light. The jar was labeled Pseudopena velenatus, which Pendergast recognized as the false featherwing beetle from the Mato Grosso swamps, a mildly poisonous insect natives used for medicine. In the row below, another series of jars contained the dried-up corpses of deadly Ugandan bog spiders in brilliant purples and yellows. Pendergast moved down the case, uncloaked the lantern again. Here were bottle after bottle of dried lizards: the harmless albino cave gekko from Costa Rica, a bottle full of dried saliva glands from the Gila monster of the Sonoran Desert, two jars full of the shriveled corpses of the tiny red-bellied lizard of Australia. Farther along were numberless cockroaches, from the giant Madagascar hissing cockroaches to beautiful green Cuban roaches, winking in their jars like tiny emerald leaves.

Pendergast realized these creatures had not been collected for taxonomic or classification purposes. One did not need a thousand bog spiders in order to do taxonomic studies—and drying insects was a poor way to preserve their biological details. And they were arranged in these cabinets in no conceivable taxonomic order.

There was only one answer: these insects had been collected because of the complex chemical compounds they contained. This was a collection of biologically active compounds, pure and simple. It was, in fact, a continuation of the inorganic chemical cabinets he had observed in the preceding rooms.

Pendergast now felt even more certain that this grand, subterranean cabinet of curiosities—this stupendous collection of chemicals—was directly related to Leng’s real work. The collections here perfectly filled the hole he’d noticed in the collections displayed in the house above. This was Antoine Leng Pendergast’s ultimate cabinet of curiosities.

In contrast to those other collections, however, this was clearly a working cabinet: many of the jars were only partially full, and some almost empty. Whatever Leng had been doing had required an enormous variety of chemical compounds. But what had he been doing? What was this grand project?

Pendergast covered the lantern again, trying to will the pain away long enough to think. According to his great-aunt, just before heading north to New York, Leng had talked of saving the human race. He remembered the word his great-aunt had used: healing. Leng would heal the world. This vast cabinet of chemicals and compounds was central to that project. It was something Leng believed would benefit humanity.

Pendergast felt a sudden spasm of pain that threatened to bend him double. With a supreme effort of will, he recovered. He had to keep going, to keep looking for the answer.

He moved out of the forest of cabinets, through an archway of hanging tapestries, into the next room. As he moved, he was racked by a second intense spasm of pain. He stopped, waiting for it to pass.

The trick he’d intended to play on Fairhaven—ducking through the secret panel without being shot—had required exquisite timing. During their encounter, Pendergast had watched Fairhaven’s face intently. Almost without exception, people betrayed by their expression the moment they decided to kill, to pull the trigger, to end the life of another. But Fairhaven had given no such signal. He had pulled the trigger with a coolness that had taken Pendergast by surprise. The man had used Pendergast’s own custom Colt. It was regarded as one of the most dependable and accurate .45 semiautomatics available, and Fairhaven clearly knew how to use it. If it hadn’t been for the man’s pause in breathing just before squeezing off the shot, Pendergast would have taken the bullet dead center and been killed instantly.