Страница 87 из 105
Chapter 67
We serve breakfast begi
“I would prefer to be served in my bedroom. Thank you in advance for obliging me.”
The porter glanced down at the twenty-dollar bill being pressed into his hand. “No problem, sir, not a problem at all. Is there anything else I can do for you?”
“Yes. You could bring me a chilled glass, some crushed ice, a bottle of cold spring water, and a tin of sugar cubes.”
“Very good, sir. I’ll be back in a jiffy.” The man stepped out of the compartment, smiling and bowing, and shut the door with almost reverential caution.
Diogenes Pendergast watched the dwarfish man disappear down the corridor and out of sight. He heard the footsteps patter away, heard the clunk of the heavy door at the end of the railroad car. He heard the myriad sounds of Pe
He shifted his gaze to the window, looked idly out at the platform. A landscape in shades of gray greeted him. A portly conductor stood there, patiently giving directions to a young woman, baby in her arms. A commuter trotted by, briefcase in hand, hurrying to catch the last Midtown Express to Dover on the adjoining track. An elderly woman tottered slowly by, frail and thin. She stopped to stare at the train, then at her ticket, before continuing on her precarious way.
Diogenes saw them all, yet he paid them little heed. They were simply visual ephemera, a distraction for his mind… to keep it from drifting toward other, more maddening thoughts.
After the first few minutes-moments of anguish, disbelief, and white-hot rage-he had more or less managed to keep the thought of his failure at arm’s length. The fact was, under the circumstances he had managed quite well: he always had multiple exit plans in place, and this evening he’d followed the most appropriate one to the letter. Barely half an hour had passed since he’d fled the museum. And yet already he was safely aboard the Lake Champlain, the overnight Amtrak train to Montreal. It was an ideal train for his purposes: it stopped at Cold Spring, on the Hudson, to change from electric to diesel, and all passengers were given thirty minutes to stretch their legs.
Diogenes would use the time to pay a final visit to his old friend Margo Green.
The hypo was already filled and lovingly nestled in its gift box, beautifully wrapped and beribboned. It was tucked safely away in his valise along with his most precious items-his scrapbooks, his personal pharmacopoeia of hallucinogens and opioids, his ghastly little trinkets and playthings of which nobody who’d ever caught sight had been permitted to live-all stowed in the overhead compartment. Enough clothing and disguises to get him safely home were hanging in the garment bag inside the small closet by the door. And safely tucked into his pocket were his documents and passports.
Now all that remained was to think as little as possible about what had happened. He did this by turning again, contemplatively, to Margo Green.
In his exhaustive, disciplined preparations for the sound-and-light show, she was the one indulgence he allowed himself. She was the only carryover from the earlier stage of his plan. Unlike the others, she was a sitting duck, to be played with and dispatched with little risk, time, or effort.
What about her, in particular, had drawn him back-more than, say, William Smithback, Nora Kelly, Vincent D’Agosta, or Laura Hayward? He wasn’t sure, but he guessed it was her long co
It had pleased him to pay her frequent sympathetic visits in her comatose state-which he had been at pains to extend, keeping her on the brink of expiration, teasing out her widowed mother’s pain to the greatest possible extent. It was a brew of suffering from which he drank deep, and whose astringent taste renewed his own thirst for the living death that was his life.
There was a knock on the door.
“Come in,” Diogenes said.
The porter entered rolling a portable bar, which he set up on an adjoining table. “Anything else, sir?”
“Not at the moment. You may make up my bed in an hour.”
“Very good, sir. I’ll get your breakfast order then.” The man retreated with another deferential bow.
Diogenes sat for a moment, once again glancing out at the platform. Then, slowly, he drew a silver flask from his breast pocket. Opening it, he poured several ounces of a brilliant green liquid-which to him looked pale gray-into the glass on the portable bar. Then he retrieved a spoon from his leather valise: a silver spoon with the Pendergast family crest stamped on its handle, somewhat melted at one corner. He handled it as one might handle one’s newborn child. Carefully, lovingly, he laid the spoon across the top of the glass and placed a sugar cube inside it. Then, taking the chilled water, he poured it onto the cube, drop by drop. Spilling over the edges of the spoon like a sugary fountain, the sweetened water fell into the liqueur below, turning it first a milky green, then a beautiful opalescent jade-if his eyes could only see in color.
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 ma
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.