Dear Mrs. Trask,
Thank you for your kind attentions of late. Your concern for my well-being is greatly appreciated. I would request, however, that you return to serving me simpler meals, without wine; the dishes you have prepared since your return from Albany have been delicious but, I fear, rather too rich for my taste.
If you could also do me the favor of telling Proctor that I desire to speak with him, I would be grateful. He can leave a note in the elevator, suggesting a convenient time.
Kind regards,
Constance
Folding the note in half, she rose from the desk; put on her silk dressing gown; and then, lighting a torch, picking up the tray holding the dishes and champagne bottle, and placing the note on top of them, walked down the short hallway.
She opened the door — then stopped short once again. This time, she did not drop the dishes or the bottle. Nor did she draw her stiletto. Instead, she carefully placed the tray to one side, patted her dressing gown to ensure the blade was at hand, and then shone the torch on the thing that had been placed outside her door.
It was a dirty, yellowed, rolled-up piece of silk, with Tibetan writing and a red handprint. She recognized it immediately as the reverse of a t’angka — a Tibetan Buddhist painting.
She picked it up and carried it to the library, where she spread it out. And then she gasped. It was of the most gorgeous appearance imaginable: a coruscation, a sunburst, of reds and golds and azures, with exquisitely delicate shading and perfection of detailing and clarity. She recognized it as a certain type of religious painting depicting Avalokiteshvara, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, sitting upon a lotus throne, which in turn rested on the lunar disk. Avalokiteshvara was the god most revered in Tibet as sacrificing his own salvation to be reincarnated again and again on earth, in order to bring enlightenment to all living, suffering beings of the world.
Except that this depiction of Avalokiteshvara was not as a man, but a young boy. And the child’s features, so exquisitely drawn, were identical, down to the fine whorls of hair and the characteristic droop of the eyelids… to those of her own son.
Constance had not seen her child — the child of herself and Diogenes Pendergast — in a year. The Tibetans had declared him a rinpoche, the nineteenth reincarnation of a revered Tibetan monk. He was hidden away in a monastery outside Dharamsala, India, safe from any interference by the Chinese. In this painting, the child was older than he had been when she last saw him. It could not have been done more than a few months before, at most…
Standing utterly still, she drank in the painted features. Despite the father, Constance could not help but feel a fierce maternal love — exacerbated by the fact that she could only visit him rarely. So this is what he looks like now, she thought, staring almost rapturously.
Whoever left this, she thought, knows my innermost secrets. The existence of my child — and my child’s identity. The hint that had begun with the location of the newly discovered orchid, Cattleya constanciana, was now made plain.
Something else was becoming clear. This person was, without doubt, courting her. But who could it be? Who could possibly know so much about her? Did he know her other secrets, as well — her true age? Her relationship to Enoch Leng?
She felt certain that he did.
For a moment, she considered engaging in another fierce and thorough search of the sub-basement. But she dropped the idea; no doubt a fresh search would be as fruitless as the last.
She knelt, picked up her note to Mrs. Trask, tore it in two, then slipped it into the pocket of her robe. There was no longer any point in sending it — because she knew now that it was not the housekeeper who had been providing her with these exquisite meals and precious wines.
But who?
Diogenes.
She quickly dismissed this as the most ridiculous speculation imaginable. True, such a fey, whimsical, teasing courtship would have been typical of Diogenes Pendergast. But he was dead.
Wasn’t he?
Constance shook her head. Of course he was dead. He had fallen into the terrible Sciara del Fuoco of the Stromboli volcano. She knew this, because she had struggled with him on the very lip of the abyss. She had pushed him herself, she had watched him fall — and had peered over the edge into the roaring winds to the smoking lava below. She was certain her revenge had been complete.
Besides, in life Aloysius’s brother had had nothing but contempt for her — he’d made that abundantly clear. You were a toy, he had written: a mystery easily solved; a dull box forced and found empty.
Her hands clenched at the mere memory.
It wasn’t Diogenes; that was impossible. It was someone else — someone who also knew her deepest secrets.
It came to her like a bolt of lightning. He’s alive, she thought. He didn’t drown, after all. And he has returned to me.
She was overwhelmed with a tidal wave of emotion. She felt almost crazy with hope, frantic with anticipation, her heart suddenly battering in her chest as if it would break free.
“Aloysius?” she cried into the darkness, her voice breaking, whether with laughter or weeping she didn’t know. “Aloysius, come out and show yourself! I don’t know why you’re being so coy, but for God’s sake please, please let me see you!”
But the only reply was her own voice, echoing faintly through the subterranean chambers of stone.
15
Rocky Filipov, captain of the F/V Moneyball, a sixty-five-foot converted trawler, turned his head and ejected a stream of brown tobacco juice onto the deck, where it joined a sticky layer of grease, diesel fuel, and rotten fish juice.
“It’s simple,” the crewman, Martin DeJesus, was saying. “It’s taking too long. Just fucking shoot him, put him in a fish sack, weigh it down, and throw him overboard.”
A cold wind blew across the deck of the Moneyball. It was a deep overcast night with no stars, and they were snugly berthed in Bailey’s Hole, not far from the Canadian-U.S. border. The small group stood on the deck of the dark boat, and all Filipov could see of the others were the glowing tips of their cigarettes. There were no other lights; the Moneyball had extinguished its anchor and running lights, and even the red illumination of the pilothouse had been doused.
“I’m with Martin,” came the heavy voice of Carl Miller, followed by a brightening of his cigarette; a loud exhale. “I don’t want to keep him on board any longer — they’re just stringing us along. Screw the swap. It’s too risky.”
“It’s not risky,” said the cook. “We can be in international waters inside of an hour. The next shipment is weeks away. Arsenault’s a mate of ours; he’s worth the trade.”
“Yeah. Maybe. Then why aren’t the feds playing ball?”
Captain Filipov listened to the back-and-forth. The crew needed to talk it out. Tensions had been rising in recent days. The crew that was still on board, minus the watch on deck, had gradually assembled in the lee of the pilothouse to hash it out once and for all. He hunched in the cold wind, leaned against the steel pilothouse wall, arms crossed.
“I think they’re setting us up,” said Juan Abreu, the ship’s engineer.
“Doesn’t matter,” said the cook. “If we get even the least whiff of the thing going south, then we’ll take off and dump the guy overboard. We’d still have that watch of his to sell.”