He moved out of the forest of cabinets, through an archway of hanging tapestries, into the next room. As he moved, he was racked by a second intense spasm of pain. He stopped, waiting for it to pass.
The trick he’d intended to play on Fairhaven—ducking through the secret panel without being shot—had required exquisite timing. During their encounter, Pendergast had watched Fairhaven’s face intently. Almost without exception, people betrayed by their expression the moment they decided to kill, to pull the trigger, to end the life of another. But Fairhaven had given no such signal. He had pulled the trigger with a coolness that had taken Pendergast by surprise. The man had used Pendergast’s own custom Colt. It was regarded as one of the most dependable and accurate .45 semiautomatics available, and Fairhaven clearly knew how to use it. If it hadn’t been for the man’s pause in breathing just before squeezing off the shot, Pendergast would have taken the bullet dead center and been killed instantly.
Instead, he had taken the bullet in his side. It had passed just below the left rib cage and penetrated into the peritoneal cavity. In as detached a way as possible, Pendergast once again considered the precise form and nature of the pain. The bullet had, at the very least, ruptured his spleen and perhaps perforated the splenetic flexure of the colon. It had missed the abdominal aorta—he would have bled to death otherwise—but it must have nicked either the left colic vein or some tributaries of the portal vein, because the blood loss was still grave. The law enforcement Black Talon slug had done extensive damage: the wound would prove fatal if not treated within a few hours. Worse, it was severely debilitating him, slowing him down. The pain was excruciating, but for the most part he could manage pain. He could not, however, manage the growing numbness that was enfeebling his limbs. His body, bruised from the recent fall and still not fully recovered from the knife wound, had no reserves to fall back on. He was fading fast.
Once again, motionless in the dark, Pendergast reviewed how his plans had miscarried; how he had miscalculated. From the beginning, he had known this would be the most difficult case of his career. But what he had not anticipated were his own psychological shortcomings. He had cared too much; the case had become too important to him. It had colored his judgment, crippled his objectivity. And now for the first time he realized that there was a possibility—indeed, a high probability—of failure. And failure meant not only his own death—which was inconsequential—but also the deaths of Nora, Smithback, and many other innocent people in the future.
Pendergast paused to explore the wound with his hand. The bleeding was growing worse. He slipped off his jacket and tied it as tightly as he could around his lower torso. Then he uncloaked the lantern and, once again, held it briefly aloft.
He was in a smaller room now, and he was surprised at what he found. Instead of more chemical compounds, the tiny space was crowded with cases of birds, stuffed with cotton. Migrating birds. All arranged taxonomically. A superb collection, even including a suite of now-extinct passenger pigeons. But how did this collection fit with the rest? Pendergast felt staggered. He knew, deep down, that all this fit together, was part of some great plan. But what plan?
He stumbled on, jostling his wound as little as possible, into the next room. He lifted his light once again, and this time froze in utter astonishment.
Here was a collection entirely different from the others. The lantern revealed a bizarre aggregation of clothing and accessories, arrayed on dressmaker’s dummies and in cases along both walls: rings, collars, hats, fountain pens, umbrellas, dresses, gloves, shoes, watches, necklaces, cravats—all carefully preserved and arranged as if in a museum, but this time with no apparent systemization. It seemed very unlike Leng, this haphazard collection from the past two thousand years, from all over the world. What did a nineteenth-century Parisian man’s white kid glove have to do with a medieval gorget? And what did a pair of ancient Roman earrings have to do with an English umbrella, or to the Rolex watch sitting next to it, or to the flapper-era high-heeled shoes beside that? Pendergast moved painfully forward. Against the far wall, in another case, were door handles of all kinds—none holding the slightest aesthetic or artistic interest—beside a row of eighteenth-century men’s powdered wigs.
Pendergast hid the lantern, pondering. It was an utterly bizarre collection of commonplace objects, none of them particularly distinguished, arranged without regard to period or category. Yet here they were, preserved in cases as if they were the most precious objects in the world.