“You’ve already secured that place, many times over,” I assured him.
“Ah.” Rolling his head back and forth. “Fame is fleeting, Will. It is not fame I crave; it is immortality.”
“Perhaps you should seek out a priest.”
He chuckled. His right eye came open to consider me, closed again.
“Too easy,” he murmured.
“What?”
He cleared his throat. “I’ve always thought, if heaven is such a wonderful place, why is entering it so absurdly easy? Confess your sins, ask forgiveness—and that is all? No matter what your crimes?”
“I haven’t been to church since my parents died,” I answered. “But if memory serves, there are one or two crimes for which there is no forgiveness.”
“Again, then what sort of god is this? His love is either infinite or it is not. If it is, there can be no crime beyond forgiveness. If not, we should pick a more honest god!”
He placed the book on the table beside him and stood up. He stretched his long arms over his head.
“But I have little patience for mysteries of the unsolvable variety. Tell me, where have you put it?”
I did not play dumb. What would be the point? “In the basement.”
He nodded. “I must have a look at it.”
“It’s alive,” I said.
“Well, of course it is. You wouldn’t have come looking for me if it weren’t.”
He stopped before me, placing his hands upon my shoulders and drilling into my bones with his dark, backlit eyes. “I hope you didn’t pay too much for it.”
“Maeterlinck received what was coming to him,” I said.
“You are now resisting the urge to brag.”
“No.” An honest answer.
“Or chide me for losing my temper.”
“You? You are the most even-tempered man I have ever met. It’s as you’ve always told me, sir: A man must control his passions lest they control him.”
Or, in the alternative, he might choose to have none at all and thereby escape the struggle entirely.
He laughed out loud and clapped me on the shoulder. “Let’s snap to it, then! It might be alive, as you say, but still could be a case of mistaken identity.”
He did not ask me for any particulars of the transaction, that night or ever. Did not ask the price or how it was arrived at or why I decided to seek out Maeterlinck myself without telling him. For all his flaws, Warthrop was not one to look a gift horse in the mouth. The path to immortality did not lie in that direction. He was proud of me, in his way, for taking initiative in the battle, as a good foot soldier in service to the cause.
And as for Maeterlinck: I never heard from him again. I can only assume he fled to London seeking a dead man who’d been left for carrion on an island six thousand miles away. Finding neither the man nor the antidote, since neither existed, he must have thought himself doomed, until the dire moment he thought must be coming never materialized. From time to time, I wonder if his heart was filled with rage or joy—rage for having been tricked in so cruel a manner, joy for having survived when death was all but certain. Perhaps neither, perhaps both; what did it matter? It certainly didn’t matter to me. He received the priceless gift, and I the prize beyond price.
Canto 4
ONE
“T. cerrejonensis!” Lilly whispered after hearing some—but not all—of the tale. “It can’t be, Will!”
“It is,” I said.
“They’ve been extinct for nearly a hundred years. . . .”
In a lavender gown, holding my wrist, looking into my face with depthless blue eyes.
“Or so everyone assumed,” I said.
In my morning suit, with carefully gelled hair fashionably long, smiling down into those eyes.
“Are you satisfied?” I whispered. “Shall we go on? Or do you wish to turn back? The dance is over, but I know this little club on the East Side . . .”
She pursed her lips impatiently and shook her curls and her luminous eyes glittered with a fire too bright for such dingy surroundings and I might have kissed her then, before that final turn, that last juncture, in her lavender dress with lace that whispered against her bare skin. But a man must control his passions lest they control him—if he has them. And that is the rub, the central question, the paramount if.
“Of course,” she scolded me. “Don’t be a fool.”
“I am no fool,” I assured her, and, clasping her hand firmly in mine, drew her around the last corner, the final turn, the terminus of the labyrinth, where the Locked Room waited for us.
I held up immediately, pushing her behind me with one hand while fumbling in my pocket for the doctor’s revolver with the other.
The door hung open.
The Locked Room was not.
And outside it a man lay facedown in a pool of blood that shimmered black in the amber light.
Behind me Lilly gasped. I eased forward, stepped carefully over the body, and stuck my head inside the room.
“Will!” she called softly, edging closer.
“Stay back!” I took in the scene within the room quickly, and then stepped back into the hall.
“Is it . . . ?”
I nodded. “Gone.”
I knelt by the man in the hall. Body warm, blood cool but tacky; he had not been dead long. The fatal wound was not hard to discern: a high-caliber bullet administered to the back of the head at close range.
I looked up at her; she looked down at us, at me and the dead man beside me.
“The key is still in the lock,” I said.
And she replied, “Adolphus.”
I sprang forward, seizing her hand as I went, and together we raced back to the office of the old man, the one who had told me, not so very long ago, that he would never join the monstrumological ranks because, in his words, They die! They die like turkeys on Thanksgiving Day!
His body was not quite as warm as the one lying in the hall. I flung him to the floor and pounded upon his chest and breathed into his open mouth—after flinging aside the upper dentures—and cried his name into his sightless eyes. I pulled open his jacket. His entire shirtfront was soaked in blood. I looked up at Lilly and shook my head. She covered her mouth and turned away, stumbled through the dusty detritus toward the door. I was upon her in two strides.
“Lilly!” I grabbed her arm and whirled her round. “Listen to me! Warthrop—you must find him. He’ll be back at our rooms at the Plaza—”