Brimstone

D'Agosta shook his head. "You figured all that out just from that little box of things?"

"Sometimes the small things speak the loudest." And as the Rolls shot from the curb and accelerated down the street, Pendergast glanced over. "Would you slide my laptop out of the dash there, Vincent? Let us find out what light Professor Charles F. Ponsonby Jr. can shed on things."

{ 47 }

As Pendergast drove south, D'Agosta booted the laptop, accessed the Internet via a wireless cellular co

"I thought the name was familiar," Pendergast said. "A specialist in the Italian Renaissance, I believe. Lucky for us he's still teaching-no doubt as professor emeritus by now. Bring up his curriculum vitae, if you will, Vincent."

As Pendergast merged onto the New Jersey Turnpike and smoothly accelerated into the afternoon traffic, D'Agosta read off the professor's appointments, awards, and publications. It was a lengthy process, made lengthier by the numerous abstracts Pendergast insisted on hearing recited verbatim.

At last, he was done. Pendergast thanked him, then slipped out his cell phone, dialed, spoke to directory information, redialed, spoke again briefly. "Ponsonby will see us," he said as he replaced the phone. "Reluctantly. We're very close, Vincent. The photograph proves that all four of them were together at least once. Now we need to know exactly where they met, and-even more important-just what happened during that fateful encounter to somehow bind them together for the rest of their lives."

Pendergast pushed the car still faster. D'Agosta shot a surreptitious glance in his direction. The man looked positively eager, like a hound on a scent.

Ninety minutes later the Rolls was cruising down Nassau Street, quaint shops on the left and the Princeton campus on the right, Gothic buildings rising from manicured lawns. Pendergast slid the Rolls into a parking space and fed the meter, nodding to a crowd of students who stopped to gawk. They crossed the street, passed through the great iron gates, and approached the enormous facade of Firestone Library, the largest open-stack library in the world.

A small man with a thatch of untidy white hair stood before the glass doors. He was exactly what D'Agosta imagined a Professor Ponsonby would look like: fussy, tweedy, and pedantic. The only thing missing was a briar pipe.

"Professor Ponsonby?" Pendergast asked.

"You're the FBI agent?" the man replied in a reedy voice, making a show of examining his watch.

Three minutes late, D'Agosta thought.

Pendergast shook his hand. "Indeed I am."

"You didn't say anything about bringing a policeman ."

D'Agosta felt himself bristling at the way he pronounced the word.

"May I present my associate, Sergeant Vincent D'Agosta?"

The professor shook his hand with obvious reluctance. "I have to tell you, Agent Pendergast, that I don't much like being questioned by the FBI. I will not be bullied into giving out information on former students."

"Of course. Now, Professor, where may we chat?"

"We can talk right there on that bench. I would rather not bring an FBI agent and a policeman back to my office, if you don't mind."

"Of course."

The professor marched stiffly over to a bench beneath ancient sycamores and sat down, fussily cocking one knee over the other. Pendergast strolled over and took a seat beside him. There wasn't room for D'Agosta, so he stood to one side, arms folded.

Ponsonby removed a briar pipe from his pocket, knocked out the dottle, began packing it.

Now it's perfect, thought D'Agosta.

"You aren't the Charles Ponsonby who just won the Berenson Medal in Art History, are you?" asked Pendergast.

"I am." He removed a box of wooden matches from his pocket, extracted one, and lit the pipe, sucking in the flame with a low gurgle.

"Ah! Then you are the author of that new catalogue raiso

"Correct."

"A splendid book."

"Thank you."

"I shall never forget seeing The Visitation in the little church in Carmignano. The most perfect orange in all of art history. In your book-"

"May we get to the point, Mr. Pendergast?"

There was a silence. Ponsonby apparently had no interest in discussing academic subjects with gumshoes, no matter how cultivated. For once, Pendergast's usual charm offensive had failed.

"I believe you had a student named Ranier Beckma

"You mentioned that on the phone. I was his thesis adviser."

"I wonder if I could ask you a few questions."

"Why don't you ask him directly? I have no intention of becoming an FBI informant, thank you."

D'Agosta had run into this type before. Deeply suspicious of law enforcement, treating every question as a personal challenge. They refused to be flattered into compliance and fought you every step of the way, citing all kinds of spurious legalisms about the right to privacy, the Fifth Amendment, the usual bullshit.

"Oh, you didn't know?" Pendergast said, his voice smooth as honey. "Mr. Beckma

Silence. "No, I didn't know." More silence. "How?"

Now it was Pendergast's turn to be unforthcoming. Instead, he dropped another tantalizing nugget. "I've just come from the exhumation of his body .     But perhaps this isn't an appropriate topic of conversation, seeing as how you two weren't close."

"Whoever told you that was misinformed. Ranier was one of my best students."

"Then how is it you didn't hear about his death?"

The professor shifted uneasily. "We lost touch after he graduated."

"I see. Then perhaps you won't be able to help us, after all." And Pendergast made a show of preparing to stand.

"He was a brilliant student, one of the best I've ever had. I was-I was very disappointed he didn't want to go on to graduate school. He wanted to go to Europe, do a grand tour on his own, a sort of wandering journey without any kind of academic structure. I did not approve." Ponsonby paused. "May I ask how he died and why the body was exhumed?"

"I'm sorry, but that information can be disclosed only to Mr. Beckma

"I tell you, we were very close. I gave him a book at parting. I've only done that with half a dozen students in my forty years of teaching."

"And this was in 1976?"

"No, it was in 1974." The professor was very glad to offer the correction. Then a new thought seemed to strike him. He looked at Pendergast afresh. "It wasn't homicide .     was it?"

"Really, Professor, unless you can get the permission of a family member to release this information-you do know someone in his family, I daresay?"

The professor's face fell. "No. No one."

Pendergast arched his eyebrows in surprise.

"He wasn't close to his family. I can't recall him ever mentioning them."

"Pity. And so you say that Beckma

"No. I got a note from Scotland at the end of August of that year. He was preparing to leave some farming commune he'd joined and head to Italy. I felt it was just some stage he had to go through. To tell you the truth, these past dozen years I'd been half expecting to see his name turn up in one of the journals, or perhaps to hear of an art opening of his. I've often thought of him over the years. Really, Mr. Pendergast, I would appreciate hearing anything you might be able to tell me about him."