Blue Labyrinth (28 page)

F
or as long as Margo had been associated with the New York Museum of Natural History, Jörgensen had been “retired.” And yet every day he continued to occupy the corner office where he had always been, seeming never to go home—if he even had a home—and grumbling at anyone who disturbed him. Margo paused at his half-open door, hesitating to knock. She could see the old man bent over some seedpods, studying them under a glass, his head entirely bald, his bushy eyebrows bristling from his face.

She knocked. “Dr. Jörgensen?” she ventured.

The head rotated and a pair of bleached-blue eyes turned on her. He said nothing but the expression in the eyes was one of annoyance.

“Sorry to bother you.”

This was met with a noncommittal grunt. Since no offer to enter seemed forthcoming, Margo went in uninvited.

“I’m Margo Green,” she said, offering her hand. “I used to work here.”

Another grunt and a withered hand met hers. The eyebrows knitted up. “Margo Green… Ah, yes. You were around during the time of those awful killings.” He shook his head. “I was a friend of Whittlesey, poor old soul—”

Margo swallowed and hastened to change the subject. “That was a long time ago, I hardly remember the killings,” she lied. “I was wondering—”

“But
I
remember,” said Jörgensen. “And I remember you. Funny, your name came up recently. Now, where was that…?”

He cast about with his eyes but, finding nothing, looked back at her. “What happened to that tall fellow with the cowlick you used to go around with? You know, the one who loved the sound of his own voice?”

Margo hesitated. “He died.”

Jörgensen seemed to contemplate this for a moment. “Died? Those were dark days. So many died. So, you moved on to greener pastures?”

“I did.” She hesitated. “There were too many bad memories here. I work for a medical foundation now.”

A nod. Margo felt encouraged. “I’m looking for help. Some botanical advice.”

“Very well.”

“Are you familiar with the mycoheterotrophs?”

“Yes.”

“Great. Well, I’m interested in a plant called
Thismia americana
.”

“It’s extinct.”

Margo took a deep breath. “I know. I was hoping… wondering… if there might be a specimen of a similar mycoheterotroph in the Museum’s collection.”

Jörgensen leaned back in his chair and made a tent with his fingers. Margo could see she was in for a lecture. “
Thismia americana
,” he intoned, as if not having heard her last sentence, “was a rather celebrated plant in botanical circles. It’s not only extinct, but when it was alive it was one of the rarest plants known. Only one botanist ever saw it and took samples. The plant disappeared around 1916, thanks to the expansion of Chicago. It vanished without a trace.”

Margo pretended to be interested in this mini-lecture, even though she already knew every detail. Jörgensen stopped without having answered her question.

“So,” she said, “only one botanist took specimens?”

“That is correct.”

“And what happened to those samples?”

At this, Jörgensen’s ancient face creased into an unusual smile. “They’re right here, naturally.”

“Here? In the Museum’s collection?”

A nod.

“Why isn’t it listed in the online catalog?”

Jörgensen waved his hand dismissively. “That’s because it’s in the Herbarium Vault. There’s a separate catalog for those specimens.”

Margo was speechless at her good luck. “Um, how can I gain access to it?”

“You can’t.”

“But I need it for my research.”

Jörgensen’s face began to take on a pinched look. “My dear girl,” he began, “access to the Herbarium Vault is strictly limited to Museum curators, and then only with the written permission of the director himself.” His voice took on a schoolmaster’s tone. “Those extinct plant specimens are very fragile, and simply can’t stand handling by inexperienced laypersons.”

“But I’m not an inexperienced layperson. I’m an ethnopharmacologist and I have a good reason, a very good reason, to study that specimen.”

The bushy eyebrows raised. “Which is?”

“I’m, ah, doing a study of nineteenth-century medicine—”

“Just a minute,” said Jörgensen, interrupting, “
now
I recollect where your name came up!” A withered hand snaked out and extracted a document from atop a pile of paper. “I recently received a memo regarding your status here at the Museum.”

Margo was brought up short. “What?”

Jörgensen glanced at it, and then proffered it to her. “See for yourself.”

It was a memo from Frisby to all staff in the Department of Botany. It was short.

Margo was well aware how this little bit of bureaucratese translated: “Level 5” access meant no access at all. “When did you get that?”

“This morning.”

“Why didn’t you mention it before?”

“I don’t pay much attention to Museum missives these days. It’s a miracle I remembered it at all. At eighty-five, my memory isn’t what it used to be.”

Margo sat in the seat, trying to get her temper under control. It would do no good to get mad in front of Jörgensen.
Best to be straight
, she thought.

“Dr. Jörgensen, I have a friend who is gravely ill. In fact, he’s dying.”

A slow nod.

“The only thing that can save him is an extraction from this plant—
Thismia americana
.”

Jörgensen frowned. “My dear girl…”

Margo swallowed hard. She was getting awfully tired of this “dear girl” business.

“… You can’t be serious. If this plant would truly save his life, may I see a medical statement to that effect, signed by his doctor?”

“Let me explain. My friend was poisoned, and this extract must be part of the antidote. No doctor knows anything about this.”

“This sounds like quackery to me.”

“I promise you—”

“But even if it were legitimate,” he went on, overriding her, “I would never allow the destruction of an
extinct
plant specimen, the last of its kind, for a one-off medicinal treatment. What is the value of an ordinary human life
in the face of the last specimen of an extinct plant in existence
?”

“You…” Margo looked at his face, creased with lines of extreme disapproval. She was flabbergasted by the sentiment he had just expressed: that a scientific specimen was worth more than a human life. She was never going to get through to this man.

She thought fast. She had seen the Herbarium Vault years ago, and recalled that it was essentially a walk-in safe with a keypad lock. The combinations to such locks, for security purposes, were changed
on a regular basis. She looked at Jörgensen, who was frowning at her, his arms crossed, waiting for her to finish what she had started to say.

He said his memory wasn’t so sharp these days. Now, that was an important fact. She glanced around the office. Where would he write down a combination? In a book? In his desk? She remembered the old Hitchcock film
Marnie
, where a businessman had kept the combination to his safe inside a locked drawer of his secretary’s desk. It could be in a thousand places, even in an office this small. Perhaps she could trick him into revealing the location.

“Dr. Green, is there anything else—?”

If she didn’t think of something fast, she’d never get in that vault… and Pendergast would die. The stakes were that high.

She looked directly at Jörgensen. “Where do you hide the combination to the vault?”

The briefest flicker of his eyes, and then he locked them back on her. “What an offensive question! I’ve wasted quite enough time with you already. Good day, Dr. Green.”

Margo rose and left. In that brief moment, his eyes had involuntarily flickered to a spot above and behind her head. As she turned to leave, she observed that the space was occupied by a small, framed botanical print.

She felt hopeful that behind that print would be a safe containing the combination. But how to get Jörgensen out of his bloody office? And even if she found a safe, where would she find
its
combination? And, assuming she managed to learn the combination, the Herbarium Vault was located deep within the Museum’s basement…

Nevertheless, she had to try.

In the middle of the hallway, she paused. Should she pull a fire alarm? But that would cause the wing to be evacuated and probably get her into trouble.

She continued walking down the hallway, offices and labs on either side. It was still lunch hour, and the place was relatively empty. In one empty lab she spied a Museum phone. She ducked inside, staring at the phone. Could she call him, pretend to be someone’s secretary, ask him to come to a meeting? But he didn’t look like someone
who went to meetings… nor someone who would respond favorably to an unexpected summons. And wouldn’t he know most of the secretaries’ voices?

There
must
be a way to get him out of the office. And that way would be to get him mad, send him off in a fury to dress down a colleague.

She picked up the phone. Instead of calling Jörgensen, she called Frisby’s office. Disguising her voice, she said: “This is the Botany Department office. May I speak with Dr. Frisby? We have a problem.”

Frisby came on a moment later, out of breath. “Yes, what is it?”

“We received your memo about that woman, Dr. Green,” Margo said, keeping her voice muffled and low.

“What about it? She hasn’t been bothering you down there, has she?”

“You know old Dr. Jörgensen? He’s a good friend of Dr. Green. I’m afraid he’s planning to defy your express wishes and give her access to the collection. He’s been railing about your memo all morning. I only mention this because we don’t want trouble, and you know how difficult Dr. Jörgensen can be—”

Frisby slammed down the phone. Margo waited in the empty lab, its door partly open. In a few minutes she heard a huffing sound and an enraged Jörgensen came striding past, face red, looking remarkably robust for his age—no doubt heading for Frisby’s office to set him straight.

Margo quickly hustled down the hall and, to her relief, found that his office door had been left wide open in his hurried exit. She ducked in, eased the door shut, and lifted the botanical print from the wall.

Nothing. No safe—just a blank wall.

She felt crushed. Why had he looked in that direction? There was nothing else on the wall. Maybe it was just a random glance, or maybe she hadn’t gotten a good fix on it. She was about to put the picture back when she noticed a piece of paper taped to the rear of the frame, with a list of numbers on it. All the numbers had been crossed out but the last.

A
loysius Pendergast lay in bed, keeping as still as possible. Every movement, even the tiniest, was an agony. Just breathing in enough air to oxygenate his blood sent white-hot needles of pain through the muscles and nerves of his chest. He could feel a dark presence waiting at the foot of his bed, a succubus ready to climb on top and suffocate him. But whenever he tried to look at it, it vanished, only to reappear when he looked away.

He tried to will the pain away, to lose himself in the contents of his bedroom, to focus his concentration on a painting on the opposite wall, one in which he had often taken solace: a late work by Turner,
Schooner off Beachy Head
. He would sometimes lose himself for hours in the painting’s many layers of light and shadow, in the way Turner rendered the sheets of spume and the vessel’s storm-tossed sails. But the pain, and the vile reek of rotting lilies—cloying, sickly-sweet, like the stench of suppurating flesh—made such mental escape impossible.

All his usual mechanisms for coping with emotional or physical trauma had been taken away by the sickness. And now the morphine drip was exhausted and would not be replenished for another hour. There was nothing but a landscape of pain, stretching away endlessly on all sides.

Even in this extremity of his illness, Pendergast knew that the
malady afflicting him had its ebbs and swells. If he could survive this current onslaught of pain, it would—in time—subside to afford temporary relief. He would be able to breathe again, to speak, even to rise from his bed and move about. But then the swell of pain would return, as it always did—and each time it was worse and more prolonged than before. And he sensed that at some point soon, the escalation of pain would stop subsiding, and the end would come.

And now, at the periphery of his consciousness, came the crest of the wave of pain: a creeping blackness at the edges of his vision, a vignetting of sorts. It was a signal that, within minutes, he would lose consciousness. Initially, he had welcomed this release. But in a cruel twist, he had soon learned there was, in fact, no release. Because the blackness led, not to a void, but to a hallucinogenic underworld of his subconscious self that had proven in some ways even worse than the pain.

Moments later the blackness caught him in its grip, tugging him from the bed and the dimly lighted room like an undertow catching an exhausted swimmer. There was a brief, sickening sensation of falling. And then the darkness melted away, revealing the scene like a curtain parting from a stage.

He was standing on a scarified ledge of hardened lava, high on the flanks of an active volcano. It was twilight. To his left, the ribbed flanks of the volcano led down to a distant shore, so far away as to seem a different world, where little clutches of whitewashed buildings huddled at the edge of the spume, their evening lights piercing the gloom. Directly ahead and below him was an immense chasm—a monstrous gash ripped into the very heart of the volcano. He could see the living lava roiling like blood within it, glowing a rich angry red in the shadow of the crater that rose just above. Clouds of sulfur steamed up from the chasm, and black flecks of ash, whipped by a hell-wind, skittered through the air.

Pendergast knew precisely where he was: standing on the Bastimento Ridge of the Stromboli volcano, looking down into the infamous Sciara del Fuoco—the Slope of Fire. He had stood on this same
ridge once before, just over three years ago, when he had witnessed one of the most shocking dramas of his life.

Except the place now looked different. Brutal at the best of times, it had become—playing out as it was in the theater of his fevered hallucination—something of pure nightmare. The sky encircling him was not the deep purple of twilight, but rather a sickly green, the color of rotten eggs. Livid flashes of orange and blue lightning seared the heavens. Bloated crimson-colored clouds scudded before a guttering, sallow sun. A ghastly Technicolor hue illuminated the entire scene.

As he took in the hellish vision, he was startled to see a person. Not ten feet in front of him, a man sat on a deck chair set upon a fin of old lava that stood out precariously from the ridge above the smoking Sciara del Fuoco. He was wearing dark glasses, a straw hat, a floral shirt, and Bermuda shorts, and was sipping what looked like lemonade out of a tall glass. Pendergast did not need to draw any closer to recognize, in profile, the aquiline nose, neatly trimmed beard, ginger-colored hair. This was his brother, Diogenes. Diogenes—who had disappeared at this very spot, in the horrific scene that had played out between himself and Constance Greene.

As Pendergast watched, Diogenes took a long, slow sip of the lemonade. He gazed out over the boiling fury of the Sciara del Fuoco with the placid expression of a tourist gazing out at the Mediterranean from the balcony of a Nice hotel. “
Ave, Frater
,” he said without turning toward him.

Pendergast did not reply.

“I would ask after your health, but present circumstances obviate the need for that particular bit of hypocrisy.”

Pendergast merely stared at this bizarre materialization: his dead brother, lounging on a beach chair at the edge of an active volcano.

“Do you know,” Diogenes went on, “I find the irony—the
fitting
irony—of your present predicament almost overwhelming. After all we’ve been through, after all my schemes, your end will come at the hands, not of myself, but of your own issue. Your very own son. Think
on’t, brother! I should have liked to have met him: Alban and I would have had a lot in common. I could have taught him many things.”

Pendergast did not respond. There was no point in reacting to a feverish delusion.

Diogenes took another sip of lemonade. “But what makes the irony so deliciously complete is that Alban was merely the precipitant of your undoing. Your
real
killer is our own great-great-grandfather Hezekiah. Talk about the sins of the fathers! Not only is it his own ‘elixir’ killing you—but it is because of the elixir that an indirect victim of it, this Barbeaux fellow, is now taking his revenge.” Diogenes paused. “Hezekiah; Alban; myself. It all makes for a nice family circle.”

Pendergast remained silent.

Still offering only his profile, Diogenes stared out over the violent spectacle churning at their feet. “I’d think you would welcome this chance for atonement.”

Pendergast, goaded, finally spoke. “Atonement? What for?”

“You, with your prudery, your hidebound sense of morality, your misguided desire to do right in the world—it’s always been a mystery to me that you weren’t tortured by the fact we’ve lived comfortably off Hezekiah’s fortune all our lives.”

“You’re talking about something that happened a hundred and twenty-five years ago.”

“Does the span of years do anything to lessen the agony of his victims? How long does it take to wash the blood from all that money?”

“It is a false syllogism. Hezekiah profited unscrupulously, but we were the innocent inheritors of that wealth. Money is fungible. We are not guilty.”

Diogenes chuckled—barely audible over the roar of the volcano—then shook his head. “How ironic that I, Diogenes, have become your conscience.”

The enervating anguish of Pendergast’s conscious self began to break through the hallucination. He staggered on the ridge of lava; righted himself. “I…” he began. “I… am
not
… responsible. And I will not argue with a hallucination.”

“Hallucination?” And now, finally, Diogenes turned to face his brother. The right side of his face—the side he had been presenting to Pendergast—looked as normal and as finely cast as it always had. But the left side was horribly burned, scar tissue puckering and veining the skin from chin to hairline like the bark of a tree, cheekbone and the orbit of a missing eye exposed and white.

“Just keep telling yourself that,
frater
,” he said over the roar of the mountain. And as slowly as he had turned to face Pendergast, Diogenes now turned away once more, hiding the horrible sight, his gaze once again on the Sciara del Fuoco. And as he did so the nightmare scene began to waver, dissolve, and fade away, leaving Pendergast once again in his own bedroom, the lights dim around him, fresh waves of pain surging over him once more.