He shook his head, waved his hand, rolled his eyes. “Hire two-bit hoodlums to snatch a specimen to which he himself had ready access? Even Sir Hiram isn’t that stupid.”
“Your reasoning rules out every monstrumologist as a suspect.”
He nodded. “Which leaves Maeterlinck and this mysterious client of his.”
“It’s not Maeterlinck. He’s in Europe.”
“As you’ve told me, though how you might know that . . .”
“Perhaps this client had a change of heart and decided to steal back his former property.” I hurried on. “He could have assumed where you would place it for safekeeping. Not a monstrumologist, since all monstrumologists have access to the Monstrumarium. But an outsider who is well-versed in our practices.”
“I would agree with you, Will Henry, except for the inconvenient fact that your premise is nonsensical. You and his agent agree upon a price, the transaction is consummated, and then he steals something he easily could have kept? As Maeterlinck himself said, there are men who would pay a king’s ransom for the prize—yet he did not offer it to them when he had the chance. In other words, why all the bother? The only hypothesis that fits the facts is the broker was cheated in some way: that you stole it rather than purchased it, and the offended party has taken back what is rightfully his.”
His accusation hung in the air. I had no doubt he took my silence as a confession, for he went on: “You have been with me for nearly six years. At times I think you understand this dark and dirty business better than I, but understanding that leads to arrogance and a willful disregard for simple human decency . . .”
“I do not think you should lecture me about arrogance or simple human decency.”
“I think I will lecture you about anything that suits me!” He slammed his open palm upon the cushions. “I don’t know why I waste my time with you. The more I try to teach you, the more you take from me the wrong lessons!”
“Really? What lessons would those be? What exactly are you trying to teach me, Dr. Warthrop? You are angry with me for killing those men—”
“No, I am angry with you for costing me my reputation and for jeopardizing the most spectacular find in biology in two generations!”
“You should be angry with yourself—and with Dr. von Helrung—for lying to me.”
“I have lied?” He threw back his head and laughed.
“By omission, yes! If you had told me who that man was in the Monstrumarium, had shared with me your arrangement with the Camorra that resulted in his death . . .”
“Why would anyone share that with you?”
“Because I am . . .” I stuttered to a stop, face burning, hands clenched at my sides.
“Yes. Tell me,” he said softly. “What are you?”
I wet my lips. My mouth was bone-dry. What was I? “Misinformed,” I said finally.
He seemed to think it a wondrous witticism. He was still laughing when the telephone rang. I made a move to answer it and he waved me away. His chuckles died abruptly as he listened to the party on the other end of the line.
“Yes, please, have him bring it up at once,” he said, and hung up. “Help me move this dresser, Will. We have a delivery.”
A moment later there was a soft rap upon the door. Warthrop, leaving nothing to chance, drew out his revolver and shouted, “Who is it?”
“Faulk.”
He threw back the bolt and opened the door. Mr. Faulk stepped inside holding a hat-size box. The doctor motioned for him to set it on the table by the windows and locked the door.
“Who?” Warthrop demanded, dropping the gun back into his pocket and examining the box without touching it. His agitation was palpable.
“Didn’t give his name, but he’s an old friend from earlier this evening,” Mr. Faulk answered. “Short, swarthy, ill-smelling.”
“Competello’s courier,” I said.
Warthrop waved his hand at me without turning.
“ ‘A present for the goodly Dr. Warthrop,’ was the message,” Mr. Faulk said.
“Stand back—against the far wall, please,” the monstrumologist instructed us. “I suspect I know what this ‘present’ is, but one cannot be too careful.”
“That’s my motto, Doctor,” Mr. Faulk replied. He edged toward the other side of the room and urged me to follow. Warthrop rubbed his hands together vigorously, then cupped them to his mouth and blew hard. He placed his index finger on the edge of the lid and gingerly exerted upward pressure. Mr. Faulk and I held our breaths, our bodies tense.
The lid fell back—and then the monstrumologist fell too, bringing up his hands to hide his face, his voice rising in an unearthly cry of anguish, the same cry I had heard years before from the summit of a manure block, where he had found the faceless corpse of his beloved among the stinking refuse. He spun round, colliding with the coffee table, lost his balance or perhaps his will to remain upright, and fell to his knees with a keening wail. Mr. Faulk and I rushed forward, he to Warthrop and I to the box.
A tangled mass of feathery white hair seemed to float above the blood-speckled forehead and prominent nose and age-mottled cheeks and bright blue eyes, the brightest blue I had ever seen, staring into oblivion with an expression of horror pure all the way down to the bottom: the severed head of Dr. Abram von Helrung, full lips stretched wide around the thing they had stuffed into his mouth, the thing with the lidless amber eyes that had captured me first in the basement when it broke through its shell, and I the corrupted, crowning achievement of evolution dumbstruck by the purity of its being, its godless, sinless, conscienceless perfection, now staring sightlessly back at me, dead yellow eye and dead blue eye sucking me under to be crushed in the airless, lightless depths.
From behind me the monstrumologist screamed, “What have you done?”
I did not know whether he spoke to von Helrung or to me. It may have been both. It may have been neither.
“What in God’s name have you done?”
Nothing, nothing, nothing, in God’s name, nothing.
FOUR
Abram was dead, and Pellinore was inconsolable. I’d never seen him so broken and helpless, borne down by what he had called “the dark tide.” He wailed and railed, cried and cursed; even Mr. Faulk sensed that it could not continue indefinitely: Either Warthrop would best the spell or the spell would best him. I bore a special responsibility, not because I felt in any way responsible for von Helrung’s death—no, fate had decreed me his sole caretaker, the lone guardian of the Warthropian animus. It had taken me years to understand this. He didn’t need me to sustain his body. He could hire a cook to feed him, a tailor to clothe him, a washerwoman to keep those clothes clean, a valet to wait upon him hand and foot. What he could not afford, though he possessed the wealth of Midas, the one indispensable service that only I could provide, was the care and feeding of his soul, the nurture of his towering intellect, and the incessant stroking of his pitiful, mewling, insufferable ego, the I am! squeal to the silent, inexorable Am I?