Two Graves

The dust had cleared again, and Felder could make out the image on the paper. It was a painting, oil by the look of it, of a young boy sitting on the front steps of a brownstone. He held a ball in one hand and a stick in the other, and he was looking straight out of the frame with a somewhat truculent expression.

“Ah, yes,” Goodbody murmured, glancing down at it.

Carefully, Felder turned it over and placed it to one side. Beneath was another painting, this one of a large storefront, the label R & N MORTENSON WOODEN & WILLOW WARE above it. Four children were leaning out the lower course of windows, again with rather sullen expressions on their faces.

Felder turned to the next. A boy, sitting in the back of what appeared to be a brewer’s wagon. The street beneath was very uneven, full of rubble and broken stoneware. On the verso, somebody—probably Wintour—had scrawled WORTH & BAXTER STREETS, 1879.

Several similar paintings followed. They were mostly studies of young men and women, framed by lower-class Manhattan backgrounds. A few showed men at work or children at play. Others were more formal portraits, either head-and-shoulders or full-length poses.

“Wintour was never able to sell his work,” Goodbody said. “After his death, his family—despairing of disposing with them any other way—offered everything to the society. We couldn’t accept the sketches, studies, and albums—space considerations, you understand—but we took the paintings. He was, after all, a New York artist, if a minor one.”

Felder was looking at a painting of two boys playing hoops before a storefront whose ba

He turned to the next sheet—and was utterly transfixed.

There, staring out at him, was Constance Greene. Or rather, Constance Greene as she would have looked at around six years of age. This time, Wintour had risen to the level of his subject matter. It was similar to the engraving Felder had seen in the newspaper, Guttersnipes at Play, only infinitely more life-like: the turn of the eyebrows, the faintly pouting lips, the drape of the hair, were unmistakable. Only the eyes were different. These eyes were quintessentially child-like: i

“Now, that one is quite nice,” Goodbody said. “Quite nice indeed. A candidate for display, perhaps?”

Hurriedly, as if waking up from a trance, Felder turned the page. He didn’t want Goodbody to see how powerfully the portrait had affected him—and for some obscure reason he didn’t like the idea of it being put on public display, either.

He moved rather quickly through the rest, but there were no more of Constance, and there was no lock of hair to be found.

“Do you know where I might find more of his work, Mr. Goodbody?” he asked. “I’m particularly interested in the albums and sketches you mentioned.”

“I’m afraid I have no idea. Our records indicate his family lived in Southport, Co

“I’ll do that.” Felder stood up, wobbling slightly and catching his balance on a shelf support. The portrait had thoroughly shaken him up. “Thank you so much for your time and effort.”

Goodbody beamed. “The society is always happy to help art historians in their research. Ah: it’s just nine o’clock now. Come—let me escort you back upstairs.”

17

THE LIBRARY IN THE RIVERSIDE DRIVE MANSION WAS COLD and dark, the dead ashes of the fireplace heaped with unopened mail. A long table that normally stood in one corner had been dragged into the middle of the room and was now piled with printouts and photographs, some of which had fallen to the floor and been trodden on. An oaken panel at one end of the library stood open, exposing a flat-screen monitor on which an endless loop played, over and over, of a man standing in the lobby of a hotel.

Pendergast moved restlessly around the room, like a caged animal, pausing sometimes to stare at the monitor, at other times stopping to lean over the disordered papers on the table, shuffling them about, examining one or another and then tossing it back into the heap with an impatient gesture. It was a strange collation of documents, mostly fluorescent photographs of gel electrophoresis plates, covered with shadowy lines and wavering squiggles of DNA molecules, like blurry photographs of the spirits of the dead. He picked up one, then another—held them side by side, his hands trembling—and then let both fall back into the heap.

Straightening up, he walked across the library to a small wheeled sideboard covered with bottles, poured himself a glass of Amontillado, drank it down in one gulp, filled the glass again, the liquor slopping over the rim, and drank that down as well.

Once again he began pacing. He wore no jacket—it lay slung across a chair. His tie was pulled down, his shirt rumpled. His pale blond hair was damp, and his face was covered with an unhealthy sheen of sweat.

The clock on the mantelpiece chimed out midnight.

Another turn brought him back before the bottle of Amontillado. He poured the glass, raised it to drink, but—after a moment’s hesitation—put it back down, untasted, with such force that it broke the stem, spilling the pale amber liquid.

He ignored this and resumed pacing, pausing a moment before the fireplace, where he jabbed at the dead ashes with a poker, mixing the freshly strewn letters with the dead coals.

Next, he stopped in front of the monitor and made a sustained effort to watch. Picking up the remote, he jabbed repeatedly at it with his spidery fingers, paging through the video frame by frame, peering intently at the man in the dark suit entering, standing, and leaving the lobby. He moved closer to the screen, his gaze lingering especially on the face of the man, his bearing, the way he walked, gauging his height and weight. Another impatient jab and a new video came on, this one of the same man—or was it?—striding confidently down the hallway of a different hotel lobby. Pendergast watched the two videos again and again, in slow, fast, and stop motion, zooming in, zooming out, in an endless loop of lobby-corridor-lobby-corridor, before at last tossing the remote onto a chair and moving back to the sideboard.

He took up another delicate glass with a trembling hand, spilling the sherry as he poured it, and drank it down as well, seeking to dull the edge of withdrawal with the effects of alcohol, even though he knew he was only prolonging the agony.

Another turn around the room, and then he stopped. A large, muscular figure had appeared in the door, holding a silver tray. His face, in shadow, was entirely unreadable.

“What is it, Proctor?” Pendergast asked sharply.

“If there’s nothing else, sir, I’m going to bed.”

Proctor waited for instructions, but when Pendergast said nothing he vanished a little painfully into the gloom. As soon as he was gone Pendergast resumed his pacing, his obsessive watching and rewatching of the videos, his repeated checking of the documents on the table.

In midstride, abruptly, he stopped and turned. “Proctor?” he said, not in a loud voice.

The shape materialized again in the doorway. “Yes?”

“On second thought, bring around the car, if you please.”

“May I ask where we’re going?”

“One Police Plaza.”

When Vincent D’Agosta was immersed in a particularly complex case, he found the hours from midnight to two to be an ideal time to gather his thoughts, reorder his files, and—most important—set up the corkboard he used as a way to arrange evidence in space and time, to co