Douglas Preston - Brimstone

D'Agosta looked. Almost instantly he recognized the massive head and jutting brows of Locke Bullard. The others took a moment longer, but once recognized were unmistakable: Nigel Cutforth and Jeremy Grove.

He glanced over at Pendergast. The man's silvery eyes were positively glittering. "There it is, Vincent: the connection we've been looking for."

He turned to the man lying on the bed. D'Agosta had almost forgotten him, he had been so silent. "John, may we take these items?"

"It's what I've been saving them for."

"How so?" D'Agosta asked.

"That's what I do. I keep the things they treasured, in trust for their families."

"Who’s they ?"

"The ones that die."

"Do the families ever come?"

The question hung in the air. "Everybody has a family," John finally said.

It looked to D'Agosta like some of the boxes were so rotten and discolored they'd been sitting around for twenty years. It was a long time to wait for a family member to come calling.

"Did you know Beckmann well?"

The man shook his head. "He kept to himself."

"Did he ever have visitors?"

"No." The man sighed. His hair was brittle and his eyes were watering. It seemed to D'Agosta that he was dying, that he knew it, and that he welcomed it.

Pendergast picked up the small box of memorabilia and tucked it under his arm. "Is there anything we can do for you, John?" he asked quietly.

The man shook his head and turned to the wall.

They left the room without speaking. At the stoop, they passed the three drunks again.

"Find what you were looking for?" Jed asked.

"Yes," said D'Agosta. "Thanks."

The man touched his brow with his finger. D'Agosta turned. "What will happen to all the stuff in John's room when he dies?"

The drunk shrugged. "They'll toss it."

"That was a most valuable visit," Pendergast said as they got into the car. "We now know that Ranier Beckmann lived in Italy, probably in 1974, that he spoke Italian decently, perhaps fluently."

D'Agosta looked at him, astonished. "How did you figure that out?"

"It's what he said when he lost at rummy. 'Kay Biskerow.' It's not a name, it's an expression. Che bischero! It's Italian, a Florentine dialect expostulation meaning 'What a jerk!' Only someone who had lived in Florence would know it. The coins in that cigar box are all Italian lire, dated 1974 and before. The fountain behind the four friends, although I don't recognize it, is clearly Italianate."

D'Agosta shook his head. "You figured all that out just from that little box of things?"

"Sometimes the small things speak the loudest." And as the Rolls shot from the curb and accelerated down the street, Pendergast glanced over. "Would you slide my laptop out of the dash there, Vincent? Let us find out what light Professor Charles F. Ponsonby Jr. can shed on things."

{ 47 }

As Pendergast drove south, D'Agosta booted the laptop, accessed the Internet via a wireless cellular connection, and initiated a search on Charles F. Ponsonby Jr. Within a few minutes, he had more information than he knew what to do with, starting with the fact that Ponsonby was Lyman Professor of Art History at Princeton University.

"I thought the name was familiar," Pendergast said. "A specialist in the Italian Renaissance, I believe. Lucky for us he's still teaching-no doubt as professor emeritus by now. Bring up his curriculum vitae, if you will, Vincent."

As Pendergast merged onto the New Jersey Turnpike and smoothly accelerated into the afternoon traffic, D'Agosta read off the professor's appointments, awards, and publications. It was a lengthy process, made lengthier by the numerous abstracts Pendergast insisted on hearing recited verbatim.

At last, he was done. Pendergast thanked him, then slipped out his cell phone, dialed, spoke to directory information, redialed, spoke again briefly. "Ponsonby will see us," he said as he replaced the phone. "Reluctantly. We're very close, Vincent. The photograph proves that all four of them were together at least once. Now we need to know exactly where they met, and-even more important-just what happened during that fateful encounter to somehow bind them together for the rest of their lives."

Pendergast pushed the car still faster. D'Agosta shot a surreptitious glance in his direction. The man looked positively eager, like a hound on a scent.

Ninety minutes later the Rolls was cruising down Nassau Street, quaint shops on the left and the Princeton campus on the right, Gothic buildings rising from manicured lawns. Pendergast slid the Rolls into a parking space and fed the meter, nodding to a crowd of students who stopped to gawk. They crossed the street, passed through the great iron gates, and approached the enormous facade of Firestone Library, the largest open-stack library in the world.

A small man with a thatch of untidy white hair stood before the glass doors. He was exactly what D'Agosta imagined a Professor Ponsonby would look like: fussy, tweedy, and pedantic. The only thing missing was a briar pipe.

"Professor Ponsonby?" Pendergast asked.

"You're the FBI agent?" the man replied in a reedy voice, making a show of examining his watch.

Three minutes late, D'Agosta thought.

Pendergast shook his hand. "Indeed I am."

"You didn't say anything about bringing a policeman ."

D'Agosta felt himself bristling at the way he pronounced the word.

"May I present my associate, Sergeant Vincent D'Agosta?"

The professor shook his hand with obvious reluctance. "I have to tell you, Agent Pendergast, that I don't much like being questioned by the FBI. I will not be bullied into giving out information on former students."

"Of course. Now, Professor, where may we chat?"

"We can talk right there on that bench. I would rather not bring an FBI agent and a policeman back to my office, if you don't mind."

"Of course."

The professor marched stiffly over to a bench beneath ancient sycamores and sat down, fussily cocking one knee over the other. Pendergast strolled over and took a seat beside him. There wasn't room for D'Agosta, so he stood to one side, arms folded.

Ponsonby removed a briar pipe from his pocket, knocked out the dottle, began packing it.

Now it's perfect, thought D'Agosta.

"You aren't the Charles Ponsonby who just won the Berenson Medal in Art History, are you?" asked Pendergast.

"I am." He removed a box of wooden matches from his pocket, extracted one, and lit the pipe, sucking in the flame with a low gurgle.

"Ah! Then you are the author of that new catalogue raisonné of Pontormo."

"Correct."

"A splendid book."

"Thank you."

"I shall never forget seeing The Visitation in the little church in Carmignano. The most perfect orange in all of art history. In your book-"

"May we get to the point, Mr. Pendergast?"

There was a silence. Ponsonby apparently had no interest in discussing academic subjects with gumshoes, no matter how cultivated. For once, Pendergast's usual charm offensive had failed.

"I believe you had a student named Ranier Beckmann," Pendergast went on.

"You mentioned that on the phone. I was his thesis adviser."

"I wonder if I could ask you a few questions."

"Why don't you ask him directly? I have no intention of becoming an FBI informant, thank you."

D'Agosta had run into this type before. Deeply suspicious of law enforcement, treating every question as a personal challenge. They refused to be flattered into compliance and fought you every step of the way, citing all kinds of spurious legalisms about the right to privacy, the Fifth Amendment, the usual bullshit.

"Oh, you didn't know?" Pendergast said, his voice smooth as honey. "Mr. Beckmann died. Tragically."

Silence. "No, I didn't know." More silence. "How?"