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“What about ink? Writing equipment? Those are the first things they’d have taken away.”
“Frankly, I don’t know how he’s doing it.”
There was a short silence.
“But you knew he’d communicate with us,” D’Agosta said at last in a quiet voice.
“Naturally.”
Despite himself, D’Agosta was impressed. “Now, if there was only some way to get information to Pendergast.”
Wry amusement flickered briefly in Gli
Before D’Agosta could respond, a sudden noise rose in the library: a faint, urgent squeaking, coming from the direction of Constance. D’Agosta looked over in time to see her picking up a small white mouse from the carpet, which had apparently fallen from her pocket. She calmed it with soft words, petting it softly, before returning the mouse to its hiding place. Sensing the silence in the room and the eyes upon her, she looked up, coloring suddenly.
“What a delightful little pet,” Wren said after a moment. “I didn’t know you were fond of mice.”
Constance smiled nervously.
“Wherever did you get it, my dear?” Wren went on, his voice high and tense.
“I… found it in the basement.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Among the collections. The place is overrun.”
“It seems awfully tame. And one doesn’t usually find white mice ru
“Perhaps it was somebody’s pet that escaped,” she said with some irritation, and rose. “I’m tired. I hope you’ll excuse me. Good night.”
After she had left, there was a moment of silence, and then Gli
“What was it about?”
“Her. He asked that you, Mr. Wren, keep a careful watch over her during the daytime-when you are not sleeping, of course. And that when you leave for your nighttime job at the library, you make sure the house is secure, and she in it.”
Wren seemed pleased. “Of course, of course! Glad to, very glad indeed.”
Gli
“He seems worried.”
“Very.” Gli
“And now, Lieutenant, let us go over the prep work you will be expected to accomplish once you are inside Herkmoor…”
Later on-once all the maps and boxes and charts had been packed away, and as D’Agosta was seeing Gli
“Listen a moment, if you would,” he said, plucking at D’Agosta’s sleeve.
“Sure,” D’Agosta said.
Wren leaned in close, as if to impart a secret. “Lieutenant, you are not familiar with the-the circumstances of Constance’s past existence. Let me just say that they are… unusual.”
D’Agosta hesitated, surprised by the look of agitation in the strange man’s eyes. “Okay,” he said.
“I know Constance well: I was the person who found her in this house, where she’d been hiding. She has always been scrupulously honest-sometimes painfully so. But tonight, for the first time, she lied.”
“The white mouse?”
Wren nodded. “I have no idea what it means, except that I’m convinced she’s in some kind of trouble. Lieutenant, she’s an emotional house of cards, just waiting for a puff of wind. We both need to keep a close eye on her.”
“Thank you for the information, Mr. Wren. I’ll check in as frequently as I can.”
Wren held his gaze for a moment, staring at him with remarkable urgency. Then he nodded, grasped D’Agosta’s hand briefly in his own bony claw, and vanished into the chill darkness.
Chapter 20
The prisoner known only as A sat on the bunk in solitary 44, deep within the Federal High-Risk Violent Offender Pretrial Detention Facility-the Black Hole-of Herkmoor. It was a cell of monastic spareness, eight feet by ten, with freshly whitewashed walls, a cement floor with a central drain, a toilet in one corner, a sink, a radiator, and a narrow metal bed. A fluorescent bulb, recessed into the ceiling and protected by a wire cage, provided the cell’s sole light. There was no switch: the bulb went on at 6 A.M. and went off at 10 P.M. High up on the far wall was the room’s only window, deep and barred, two inches wide and fifteen inches high.
The prisoner, dressed in a neatly pressed gray jumpsuit, had been sitting on the mattress for many hours in utter stillness. His slender face was pale and without expression, the silvery eyes half hooded, white-blond hair combed back. Nothing moved, not even his eyes, as he listened to the soft, rapid sounds filtering from the cell next door: solitary 45.
They were the sounds of drumming: a tattoo of extraordinary rhythmic complexity that rose and fell, sped up and slowed down, moving from metal bed rail to mattress to the walls, toilet, sink, bars, and back again. At present, the prisoner was drumming on the iron bedstead rail with an occasional slap or turn played out on the mattress, while making rapid popping and clucking sounds with his lips and tongue. The endless rhythms rose and fell like the wind, working into a machine gun-like frenzy and then dying back into a lazy syncopation. At times, it almost-but not quite-seemed to come to a stop: except that a single ostinato tap… tap… tap indicated that the beat went on.
An aficionado of rhythm might have recognized the extraordinary diversity of rhythmical patterns and styles coming from solitary 45: a kassagbe Congo beat segueing into a down-tempo funk-out and then into a pop-and-lock, moving sequentially through a shakeout, a wormhole, a glam, then into a long pseudo-electroclash riff; then a quick eurostomp ending in a nasty, followed by a hip-hop twist-stick and a tom club. A moment’s silence… and then a slow Chicago blues fill began, evolving into i
The prisoner known as A, however, was not an aficionado of rhythm. He was a man who knew many things-but drumming was not one of them.
And yet he listened.
Finally, half an hour before lights-out, the prisoner known as A shifted on his cot. He turned toward the headrail, gave it a cautious tap with his left index finger, then another. He began tapping out a simple 4/4 beat. As the minutes went on, he tried the beat on the mattress, then the wall and the sink-as if testing them for timbre, tone, and amplitude-before moving back to the bed rail. As he continued to beat out a 4/4 time with his left finger, he began beating a second rhythm with his right. As he played this simple rhythmic accompaniment, he listened intently to the outpouring of virtuosity next door.
Lights-out arrived, and all went black. An hour went by, and another. The prisoner’s approach subtly changed. Carefully following the drummer’s lead, A picked up an unusual syncopation here, a three-against-two beat there, adding them to his simple repertoire. He meshed his own drumming ever more closely into the web of sounds coming from next door, taking cues from his neighbor, picking up the tempo or lowering it according to the drummer’s lead.
Midnight, and the drummer in cell 45 continued-and so did the prisoner named A. A found that drumming-which he had always dismissed as a crude, primitive activity-was curiously pleasing to the mind. It opened a door from the tight, ugly reality of his cell into an expansive, abstract space of mathematical precision and complexity. He drummed on, still following the lead of the prisoner in 45, all the while increasing the complexity of his own rhythmical patterns.