D’Agosta placed a restraining hand on Waxie. “So who else you done?” he asked quickly.
“Oh, they know me. They know Jeffrey, the cherub cat. I’m on my way.”
“What about Pamela Wisher?” Waxie broke in. “Don’t deny it, Jeffrey.”
The seams at the corners of the prisoner’s muddy eyes thickened. “I don’t deny it. The scumbags disrespected me, all of them. They deserved it.”
“And what’d you do with the heads?” Waxie asked breathlessly.
“Heads?” Jeffrey asked. To D’Agosta, he seemed to falter slightly.
“You’re in too deep now; don’t start denying.”
“Heads? I ate their heads is what I did.”
Waxie cast a triumphant gaze toward D’Agosta. “What about the guy at Belvedere Castle, Nick Bitterman? Tell me about him.”
“That was a good one. That mother had no respect. Hypocrite, miser. He was the adversary.” He rocked back and forth.
“Adversary?” D’Agosta asked, frowning.
“The prince of adversaries.”
“Yes,” said Pendergast sympathetically. “You must counteract the powers of darkness.” They were the first words he’d spoken since entering.
The prisoner rocked more vigorously. “Yes, yes.”
“With your electrical skin.”
Suddenly, the rocking stopped.
“And your glaring eyes,” Pendergast continued. Then he pushed himself away from the door and came forward slowly, looking directly at the suspect.
Jeffrey stared hard at Pendergast. “Who are you?” he breathed.
Pendergast was silent for a moment. “Kit Smart,” he said at last, without removing his eyes from Jeffrey.
To D’Agosta, the change that came over the prisoner was shocking. The color seemed to drain from his face in an instant. He looked at Pendergast, mouth working silently. Then, with a shriek, he forced himself backwards with such force that the chair tipped over and crashed to the floor. Hayward and the two police guards sprang to subdue the struggling figure.
“Jesus, Pendergast, what the hell did you say to him?” Waxie said over the screams, hoisting himself to his feet.
“The right thing, apparently.” Pendergast glanced at Hayward. “Please give this fellow every comfort. I think we can let Captain Waxie take over from here.”
“So who is that guy?” D’Agosta asked as the elevator carried them back up toward the Homicide Division.
“I’m not sure what his real name is,” Pendergast replied, smoothing his tie. “But it isn’t Jeoffry. And he’s not the person we’re looking for.”
“Tell Waxie that.”
Pendergast glanced mildly at D’Agosta. “What we saw, Lieutenant, was a classic case of paranoid schizophrenia, aggravated by multiple personality disorder. You noticed how the man seemed to weave in and out of two personas? There was the blustering tough guy, no doubt as unconvincing to you as to me. Then there was the killer visionary—infinitely more dangerous. Did you hear? ‘For secondly, he hissed at me, like a snake out of Egypt.’ Or ‘Jeoffry, the cherub cat.’ ”
“Of course I heard it. The guy was talking like somebody just handed him the Ten Commandments or something.”
“Or something. You’re right, his ravings had the structure and cadence of written speech. This occurred to me, also. At that point, I recognized he was quoting from the old poem Jublilate Agno,by Christopher Smart.”
“Never heard of it.”
Pendergast smile faintly. “It’s a fairly obscure work by a fairly obscure writer. It is undeniably powerful in its strange vision, however; you should read it. The author, Smart, wrote it while he himself was half-insane in a debtor’s prison. In any case, there’s a long passage in the poem in which Smart describes his cat, Jeoffry, whom Smart believed to be some kind of chrysalis creature undergoing a physical conversion.”
“If you say so. But what does all this have to do with our vocal friend back there?”
“Obviously, the poor fellow identifies himself with the cat in the poem.”
“The cat?” D’Agosta asked incredulously.
“Why not? Kit Smart—the real Kit Smart—certainly did. It’s an extremely powerful image of metamorphosis. I feel sure this poor fellow was once an academician, or a failed poet, before the creeping descent into madness began. He killed one man, true enough—but only when his path was crossed at the wrong time. As for the rest…” Pendergast waved his hand. “There are many indications this man is not our true target.”
“Like the photographs,” D’Agosta said. All good interrogators knew that no killer could keep his eyes from photographs of his victims or artifacts from the crime scene. Yet, as far as D’Agosta could tell, Jeffrey had never moved his eyes to either picture.
“Exactly.” The elevator doors whispered open, and the two made their way through the hubbub toward D’Agosta’s office. “Or the fact that this murder, as Waxie describes it, has none of the elements of the blitzkrieg attacks suffered by the other victims. In any case, once I recognized his neurotic identification with the poem, it was easy enough to goad his madness to the surface.”
Pendergast closed the office door and waited until D’Agosta was seated before continuing. “But let’s put this irritating business behind us. Have you had any luck on that cross-correlation I requested?”
“DP just delivered it this morning.” D’Agosta thumbed through a tall sheaf of miniprinter output. “Let’s see. Eighty-five percent of the victims were male. And ninety-two percent were residents of Manhattan, including transients.”
“I’m primarily interested in things that allthe victims had in common.”
“Gotcha.” There was a pause. “All had last names beginning with letters other than I, S, U, V, X,and Z.”
Pendergast’s mouth twitched in what might have been a faint smile.
“All were older than twelve and younger than fifty-six. None of the victims were born in November.”
“Go on.”
“I think that’s it.” D’Agosta flipped some more pages. “Oh, here’s something else. We ran the data through SMUD, checking for various traits associated with serial murderers. The only common thread it found was that none of the murders were committed during a full moon.”
Pendergast sat up. “Indeed? That’s worth remembering. Anything else?”
“No, that’s it.”
“Thank you.” He sank back in the chair. “Still, it’s precious little. Information is what we need, Vincent, hard facts. And that’s why I can’t wait any longer.”
D’Agosta looked at him, uncomprehending. Then he frowned. “You’re not going down again.”
“Indeed I am. If Captain Waxie continues to insist this man is the killer, then the extra patrols will be called off. Vigilance will fade. Creating an atmosphere that can only make additional killings easier.”
“Where will you go?” D’Agosta asked.
“To the Devil’s Attic.”
D’Agosta snorted. “Come on, Pendergast. You don’t even know if such a place exists, let alone how to get there. You’ve got nothing but the word of that hobo.”
“I believe Mephisto’s word to be reliable,” Pendergast replied. “And in any case, I have considerably more than just his word. I’ve spoken with a city engineer named Al Diamond. He explained that the so-called Devil’s Attic is in reality a series of tunnels, constructed by New York’s wealthiest families before the turn of the century. They were intended as a private rail line, but abandoned after only a few years. And I’ve been able to reconstruct a rough approximation of the route of these tunnels.” Taking a marker from the desk, Pendergast moved the missing person’s map. He set the point of the marker down at the intersection of Park and 45th, drew a line over to Fifth, up to Grand Army Plaza, then diagonally across Central Park and north up Central Park West. Then he stepped back, looking at D’Agosta bemusedly.