Douglas Preston - The Book of the Dead

Okay, that was one thing: Diogenes played the piano.

He looked at the music open on the stand: Schubert’s Impromptus, opus 90. Under that, sheet music for Debussy’s “Clair de Lune,” a book of Chopin’s nocturnes. A relatively accomplished pianist at that, but probably not at the concert level.

Next to the piano was another archway, leading into the library. This room was unaccountably disordered. Books lay on the floor, some open, with gaps on the shelves. The rug was rumpled and turned up at one end, and a table lamp lay broken on the floor. A large table dominated the middle of the space, covered with black velvet; above stood a row of bright spotlights.

In one corner, Smithback saw something that sent a shiver down his spine: a large, finely machined, stainless-steel anvil. Next to it lay some rumpled rags and a strange kind of hammer made out of a gray, gleaming metal-titanium, perhaps?

Smithback backed out of the library, turned, and ascended the wooden stairs. At the top was a landing with a long hall, paintings of seascapes on both walls. A small, stuffed capuchin monkey crouched on a table, next to a glass dome under which stood a fake tree festooned with butterflies.

The doors to the rooms were all open.

Walking into the room directly at the top of the stairs, Smithback realized it must have been the one where Viola Maskelene was held prisoner. The bed was in disarray, there was a broken glass on the floor, and someone had scraped off the wallpaper on one wall, revealing metal underneath.

Metal. Smithback went over and carefully peeled off some more wallpaper. The walls were made of solid steel.

He shivered again, feeling a creeping sensation of alarm. The window was of the same thick blue-green glass as downstairs, and was barred. The door, which he examined next, was extremely heavy, also of steel, and it moved noiselessly on oversize hinges. He peered at the lock-superheavy machined brass and stainless steel.

Smithback’s feeling of nervousness increased. What if Diogenes came back? But of course he wouldn’t come back-that would be crazy. Unless there was something in the house he had forgotten…

He made a quick tour of the other bedrooms. On a hunch, he took his screwdriver and poked the wall of another room. It, too, was steel.

Did Diogenes plan to imprison more than one person? Or was the whole house fortified like this as a matter of course?

He skipped downstairs, heart pounding in his chest. The whole place was giving him the creeps. The day had proved a total waste: he’d come out there without a real plan, without looking for anything specific. He wondered if he should take notes-but of what? Maybe he should just forget it and go visit Margo Green. He was already out of the city. But that would be an equally useless journey-she had taken an abrupt turn for the worse, he understood, and was now comatose and unresponsive…

Suddenly he froze. Soft footsteps were moving across the porch.

With a sudden feeling of terror, he ducked into the coat closet at the bottom of the stairs. He pushed his way toward the back, nestling himself behind the row of cashmere, camel’s-hair, and tweed coats. He could hear the rattle of the door, and then the groan as it slowly opened.

Diogenes?

The closet was thick with the smell of wool. He could hardly breathe from fear.

Footsteps moved quietly across the carpeted entry and into the living room, then stopped. Silence.

Smithback waited.

Next, the footsteps moved into the dining room, then faded away into the kitchen.

Should he run for it?

But even before he could consider, the steps returned: slow, soft, deliberate steps. Now they moved toward the library, back out, and up the stairs.

Now. Smithback flitted out of the closet, scurried across the living room, and dashed out the open door. As he rounded the corner of the porch, he saw that a cop car was standing in the driveway, engine running, door open.

He skipped through the backyard of the house next door and ran down onto the beach, almost laughing with relief. What he had assumed was Diogenes was only a cop, coming to check on the place.

He got back in his car and spent a moment recovering his breath. A wasted day. But at least he’d exited the house in one piece.

He started the car, turned on the navigator.

“Where would you like to go?” came the smooth, sexy voice. “Please enter the address.”

Smithback punched up the menu and chose the “Office” option. He knew his way back, but he liked listening to Lavinia.

“We are going to the location called Office,” came the voice. “Proceed north on Glover’s Box Road.”

“Righty-o, darling.”

He drove slowly and nonchalantly past the house. The cop was now outside, standing next to his cruiser with a mike in his hand. He watched Smithback drive by but made no move to stop him.

“In five hundred feet, turn left on Springs Road.”

Smithback nodded. He raised a hand to brush away a wisp of tweed wool from his face. As he did so, he stiffened with an almost electric shock.

“That’s it, Lavinia!” he cried. “The coats in the closet!”

“Turn left on Springs Road.”

“There were two kinds of coats! Super-expensive cashmere and mohair, and then a bunch of heavy, hairy, itchy tweed coats. Do you know of anyone who wears both? Hell, no!”

“Proceed for one mile on Springs Road.”

“Diogenes is the cashmere-and-mohair type, for sure. That means his alter ego wears tweeds. He’s disguised as a professorial type. It’s perfect, Lavinia, it feels right. He’s a professor. No, wait! Not a professor, not exactly. After all, he knows the museum so well… The police are saying the diamond heist had to have had inside help-but can you imagine Diogenes enlisting help? Hell, it’s staring us right in the face. Holy shit, Lavinia: we nailed it! I nailed it!”

“In five hundred feet, take a left on the Old Stone Highway,” came the placid response.

What repelled Hayward most about the Bellevue psych ward wasn’t the dingy, tiled corridors, or the locked steel doors, or the mingled smell of disinfectant, vomit, and excrement. It was the sounds. They came from everywhere-a cacophony of mutterings, shrill outbursts, monotonic repetitions, glottal explosions, whining, soft high-speed babblings: a symphony of misery, now and then punctuated by a cry so hideous, so full of despair, that it wrenched her heart.

Meanwhile, Dr. Goshar Singh walked beside her, speaking in a calm, rational voice as if he heard nothing-and maybe, she thought, he didn’t. If he did, he would no longer be sane himself. It was that simple.

Hayward tried to focus on the doctor’s words. “In all my years of clinical psychiatry,” he was saying, “I’ve never seen anything quite like it. We’re trying to get a handle on it. We’ve made some progress, although not yet as much as I’d like.”

“It seems to have happened so suddenly.”

“The sudden onset is a puzzling feature, indeed. Ah, yes, Captain Hayward: here we are.”

Singh unlocked a door and held it open, ushering Hayward into an almost bare room, divided in half by a long counter, a thick plate-glass window above separating it from the other half-exactly like a visitors’ room at a prison. An intercom was set into the glass.

“Dr. Singh,” said Hayward, “I requested a face-to-face meeting.”

“I’m afraid that won’t be possible,” Singh replied almost sadly.

“I’m afraid it will be possible. I can’t question a suspect under these conditions.”

Again, Singh shook his head sadly, his plump cheeks wagging. “No, no, we’re in charge here, Captain. And I think when you see the patient, you’ll realize that it wouldn’t make a difference, no difference at all.”