“And all men are buffoons. Finish the syllogism.”
“I will find out in any case. Better to tell me now.”
“Why should I tell you something that you already know?”
“I know that it is; I don’t know what it is.”
“Do you not? You really have not progressed very far in your education, Mr. Henry.”
“Your life’s work, you called it, but all manner of things have consumed you over the years. You—and countless others.”
“Yes.” He was nodding gravely, and now I detected a hint of fear in his eyes. “There are victims in my wake—more than most men’s, but hardly more than yours, I would guess.”
“We aren’t talking about my victims, Doctor.” I picked up the knife by his hand and proceeded to clean the filth from beneath my nails. He flinched, as if the tiny scraping sound hurt his ears.
“Beatrice left me,” he whispered.
“Beatrice? Who said anything about her? We were talking about your victims.”
“Oh, what do you know about anything?”
“I know about the lambs,” I said. “And I know what you cut up and stuffed into an ash barrel. I know they both have something to do with the lock upon that door and your deplorable condition—and I know you will show it to me, because you cannot help yourself, because you know with whom your salvation lies. You have always known.”
He fell forward, burying his head in his folded arms, and the monstrumologist cried. His shoulders shook with the force of his tears. I watched impassively.
“Warthrop, give me the key or I shall break it down.”
He raised his head, and I saw the tears were not faked: His face was twisted in agony, as if some dark nameless thing were unwinding in him.
“Leave,” he whispered. “You were right to leave before. Right to leave, wrong to ever come back. Leave us, leave us. It is too late for us, but not for you.”
He recoiled at my reply, the last thing he expected me to say, or perhaps the opposite: He knew to the bottom of that secret place hidden in all hearts what I would say. “Oh, Pellinore, I fell off the edge of the plate years ago.”
TWO
In Egypt, they called him Mihos, the guardian of the horizon.
It is a very thin line, Will Henry, he told me when I was a boy. For most, it is like that line where the sea meets the sky. It cannot be crossed; though you chase it for a thousand years, it will forever stay beyond your grasp. Do you realize it took our species more than ten millennia to realize that simple fact? That we live on a ball and not on a plate?
THREE
A letter was waiting for me at the front desk of the Plaza when I returned from my evening labors. The envelope was sealed in the old-fashioned way, with a thick glob of red wax. Inside was a crudely printed message on a single sheet of paper that smelled faintly of dead fish:
Most Gentle Mr. Henry:
Hoping this finds you well, you will be so good as to send me $10,000.00 if the life of Doctor Pellinor Warthrop is dear to you. So I beg you warmly to leave them here with the clerk by five tonight. If you do, he lives. If you don’t, he dies. With regards, believe me to be your friends.
The letter was not signed. Instead there was a crude drawing of a human hand colored black and another of a dagger dripping what I took to be blood.
I left the hotel and made straight for the brownstone on Fifth Avenue.
The owner of the house received me wearing a purple robe and matching slippers, his cottony white hair amassed in wondrous confusion atop his blocky head. He read the letter with red-rimmed eyes, sighing often and loudly, shooing away the servant who appeared bearing coffee and a plate of Apfelstrudel.
“What did the clerk say?” he asked finally.
“A short man who spoke with a thick Italian accent. Dropped off the letter around one this morning, while I was occupied with the Irish cargo on the bridge.”
He fished a cigar from the humidor. It slipped from his gnarled fingers and rolled across the Persian carpet. I scooped it up and handed it to him.
“The Black Hand!” he said. “Ah, Pellinore, did not your old master warn you not to go?”
“What is the Black Hand?”
“Did you not read the letter?” He stabbed his finger upon the drawing. “Ach, the villains! Not to be trusted. I warned him.”
“Why would an Italian be delivering a ransom letter for an Irish gang?”
“It is not the Irish; it is the Sicilians—the Camorra has taken him, that blackguard Francesco Competello. He is a dangerous man and I told him so.”
“I don’t understand, Meister Abram. Why would Dr. Warthrop . . . ?”
“Because ours is a dark and dirty business—like its ugly cousin, politics—and so it makes for strange bedfellows! It was his idea to enlist the aid of the Irish’s sworn enemies in discovering the whereabouts of T. cerrejonensis.”
“In exchange for what?”
His eyes narrowed above his hooked nose. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that criminals aren’t known for their good deeds, Meister Abram,” I answered the old fellow gently. “Dr. Warthrop must have been prepared to offer the Camorra something for their assistance.”
He waved his pudgy hand. The cigar was gripped in the other, unlit.
“He said Competello owed him for a service performed years ago in Naples, when many of the Camorristi were driven out of Italy. I do not know all the details, but it has always been his practice to nurture relationships with unsavory characters.”
I nodded, thinking of Mr. Faulk and the others like him who would appear at all hours bearing packages to the doorstep of 425 Harrington Lane. Distrusted and despised outcasts—his spiritual brothers in a sense—who asked no questions and told no tales.
“Something to do with helping to secure safe passage for him and his fellow padrones,” von Helrung went on. “ ‘It is part of their code to honor a debt,’ he told me. Bah! I hope now he has learned his lesson.”
He lit a match, but not the cigar. The flame edged dangerously close to his fingers before he dropped the match into the ashtray beside him.
“Should we pay it?” I asked.
He looked sharply at me. My question startled him. “What do you mean? Of course we must pay it!”
“But what guarantee do we have that Competello will keep his end of the bargain?”