The Wheel of Darkness Read online

  Constance fought back a groan. “Please, sir. Nobody told me. If you don’t wish your rooms cleaned, I’ll leave.”

  He stared at her, and she averted her eyes. He squeezed still harder, until she thought he would crush her wrist. Then he shoved her brutally away. She fell to the floor, vacuum clattering across the carpet.

  “Get the fuck out of here,” he growled.

  Constance rose to her feet, scooping up the vacuum and smoothing her apron as she did so. She moved past him, hanging the vacuum on its hook and wheeling the trolley across the salon to the entryway of the suite. She unlocked the front door, pushed the trolley out ahead of her, and—with a single, hooded glance back at the man who was already mounting the stairs, yelling up at his own maid for admitting a stranger into the suite—stepped into the corridor.

  31

  THE POLISHED CHERRYWOOD TABLE IN THE DINING AREA OF THE Tudor Suite was covered with an incongruous clutter—a large garbage bag of clear plastic, dribbling out a host of scraps: crumpled paper, wadded tissue, cigar ash. Pendergast circled the table like a restless cat, arms behind his back, now and then bending close to examine something but never extending a hand to touch or probe. Constance sat on a nearby sofa, dressed now in one of the elegant gowns they had purchased on board ship, watching him.

  “And he threw you to the ground, you say?” Pendergast murmured over his shoulder.

  “Yes.”

  “He’s an ill-mannered cur.” He circled the table again, then stopped to look at her. “This is all?”

  “I wasn’t able to do the upstairs of the suite. Not with the maid in residence. I’m sorry, Aloysius.”

  “Don’t be. It was an afterthought anyway. The important thing is that we know the size and location of his safe. And you’ve given me an excellent précis of his collections. Too bad the Agozyen doesn’t seem to be among them.” He dipped one hand into his pocket, pulled out a pair of latex gloves, snapped them on, then began to examine the trash. He picked up an empty seltzer bottle from the table, examined it, put it aside. This was followed by several dry-cleaning tags; a cigar butt and accumulated ash; a crumpled business card; a soiled cocktail napkin; a champagne cork; a broken compact disk case; a ship’s brochure, torn in half; a swizzle stick; an empty Swan Vesta box and half a dozen spent wooden matches. Pendergast sorted through it all with great care. Once he had put the last item aside, he again circled the table, hands behind his back, pausing to examine various items with a loupe. Then, with a quiet sigh, he straightened up.

  “Let’s put this away where housekeeping won’t take it,” he said. “Just in case we want to examine anything again.” He pulled off the gloves, dropped them on the table.

  “What next?” Constance asked.

  “Next we find a way to take a look inside that safe. Preferably when Blackburn has absented himself.”

  “That might be difficult. Something seems to have spooked him—he seems reluctant to leave his suite for any length of time, and he won’t let anybody in.”

  “If it were anybody else, I’d say the two disappearances you informed me of have spooked him. But not Mr. Blackburn. Too bad we didn’t narrow down my list more quickly; I could have examined his chambers with relative ease yesterday.” He glanced at Constance. “And we mustn’t forget that, though Blackburn may be the prime suspect, we also need to examine the rooms of Calderón and Strage, if only to rule them out.”

  He walked to the sideboard and poured himself a snifter of calvados, then came over to the couch and took a seat. He rolled the amber liquid gently, brought it to his nose, took a small sip, and gave a sigh that was half contentment, half regret. “Well, thank you, my dear,” he said. “I’m sorry you were assaulted. In the fullness of time, I shall make sure Blackburn regrets it.”

  “I’m only sorry that—” Then, abruptly, Constance fell silent.

  “What is it?”

  “I almost forgot. I retrieved something else from his suite. I used the vacuum to pick up some odd dust samples.”

  “Why odd?”

  “Considering the man has a live-in maid, and he’s clearly a petty tyrant, I thought it was strange the room was so dusty.”

  “Dusty?” Pendergast repeated.

  Constance nodded. “Most of it was along the walls, under the wainscoting. It looked like sawdust, actually.”

  Pendergast was on his feet. “Where’s the vacuum bag, Constance?” He spoke quietly, but his silver eyes glittered with excitement.

  “There, by the door—”

  But almost before the words were out, Pendergast had flitted to the front door, scooped up the bag, plucked a clean plate from a kitchen cabinet, and returned to the table. Now his movements grew excessively careful. Taking a switchblade from his pocket, he carefully slit the vacuum bag and slowly emptied the contents onto the plate. Fixing a jeweler’s loupe to his eye, he began separating the debris with the blade of his knife, scrape by tiny scrape, as if he were examining the individual grains.

  “Do you know, Constance,” he murmured as he bent over the table, face just inches from the surface of the wood. “I believe you’re right. This is sawdust.”

  “Left over from construction?”

  “No. Fresh sawdust. And if this is what I think it is”—here he jabbed at something with a pair of tiny forceps, then straightened up—“then we won’t have to bother ourselves with Calderón or Strage.”

  Constance looked at Pendergast’s pale, eager face. She couldn’t even begin to imagine how sawdust could fit in.

  As she stood up and drew near, he rummaged for an ashtray and a match. Then he motioned her to move closer. As he held the forceps over the ashtray, she could just make out, in the steel jaws, the glittering of a tiny brownish crystal.

  “Pay attention,” he said quietly. “This won’t last long.” And then he lit the match; waited a moment while the initial bloom of sulfur faded from the air; then applied the flame to the crystal.

  As they watched, it flared and smoked in the forceps. And then, very briefly, Constance caught a faint scent, borne on the air of the stateroom: a rich, musky, exotic whiff of myrrh, strange, faintly intoxicating—and unmistakable.

  “I know that smell,” she breathed.

  Pendergast nodded. “The smell of the inner monastery of Gsalrig Chongg. A special kind of incense, made only by them, used to keep a uniquely voracious species of woodworms at bay.”

  “Woodworms?” Constance repeated.

  “Yes.”

  She turned to the small mound on the table. “You mean that sawdust . . . ?”

  “Exactly. Some of those same woodworms must have come on board in the box that housed the Agozyen. Blackburn has done the North Star line no favors by introducing them to the Britannia.” He turned to face her, his eyes still glittering with excitement. “We have our man. Now all that remains is to lure him from his lair and get inside his safe.”

  32

  SCOTT BLACKBURN WALKED TO THE FRONT DOOR OF HIS SUITE, placed a Do Not Disturb card on the outside knob, then bolted it from the inside. Climbing two flights of stairs to his dressing room, he yanked off his tie, removed his suit jacket and shirt, tossed them into a corner for his maid to hang up, and slipped out of his pants. For a moment he stood in front of the full-length mirror, rippling his muscles, absently admiring his torso. Then, from a locked drawer, he drew out a set of saffron-colored Toray silk robes. He slowly dressed himself in them, first the inner robe, then the upper robe, and finally the outer robe, the fine silk slipping across his skin like quicksilver. He arranged the pleats, folding the robe over and leaving one chiseled shoulder and arm bare.

  He stepped into his private sitting room, shut the doors, and stood in its center, surrounded by his Asian art collection, deep in thought. It was necessary, he knew, to calm his mind, which had been greatly disturbed by what he had heard at the dinner table that evening. So a maid had been in his room yesterday. And she had subsequently gone crazy, killed herself. The chief of security had
questioned him—all allegedly routine. And then again, just now, he’d caught another ship’s maid in his suite, despite his strictest orders to the hotel manager and the head of the housekeeping staff. Was it a coincidence?

  Or was he, in fact, under scrutiny? Had his movements, his activities, his acquisitions, been tracked?

  In his fierce climb to the top of the Silicon Valley hierarchy, Blackburn had long ago learned to trust his sense of paranoia. He had learned that, if his instincts told him somebody was out to get him, then somebody generally was. And here, trapped on this ship, without recourse to his usual layers of security, he was in an unusually vulnerable position. He’d heard rumors there was some kind of private investigator on board, an eccentric passenger by the name of Pendergast, looking for a thief and murderer.

  Was the bastard investigating him?

  There was no way to be certain, but the more he thought about it, the more it seemed likely. He couldn’t afford to take a chance; the stakes were too high. His adversary—for, if his instincts were right, there could be no other term for him—would have to be dealt with in a special way.

  A very special way.

  He turned off all the lights in the room and stood in the dark, sharpening his senses. First he listened intently, teasing out every little sound—from the faint thrumming of the engines deep within the riveted steel, to the moaning of wind and sea; the splatter of rain against the glass; the sobbing of his private maid in her bedroom; the muffled footfalls in the corridor outside. He tuned in to the sensations of his own body, his bare feet on the plush nap, the scent of sandalwood and beeswax in the cabin, the sensation caused by the deep, ponderous rolling of the ship.

  He inhaled, exhaled. The three enemies—hate, desire, and confusion—had to be temporarily banished. All must be calm. Of these three, hate was the most powerful of the enemies, and now it almost suffocated Blackburn in its triumphant embrace.

  With iron self-control, he moved to an easel standing beside the far wall, on which something was propped up, covered by a tied shroud of the finest silk. It had been a foolish mistake not to keep it in the safe from the very beginning; but he had hated the idea of locking it away when he needed it so frequently. His own private maid had been given strict instructions never to lift the silk and look upon it. And he knew she wouldn’t—it had taken him years to find someone as reliable, unimaginative, and incurious as her. But the first ship’s maid—the one who killed herself—must have lifted the veil. Now, if his suspicions were true and this Pendergast was after it, even the safe wouldn’t be secure enough. Hotel safes were notoriously easy to break into, and ship’s safes, even a big one, were probably no different. They were designed to keep out petty thieves, and no more.

  He would have to find a better hiding place.

  Scrupulously avoiding looking at it, he gingerly lifted the silk covering from the object and placed it in the center of the room. With ceremonial care, he arranged thirty-six butter candles on a large silver tray, lit them, then placed them in front of the object to better illuminate it—all the while keeping his eyes averted. He placed bundles of joss sticks into two elaborately chased gold thuribles, arranging them on either side of the object.

  The butter candles flickered, filling the room with their peculiar, dancing, golden light. Next, he laid out a quilted silk mat before the candles and seated himself, lotus-style, upon it. Closing his eyes, he began to chant: a strange, low, humming that the careful listener would hear as a braid of the same strange sounds linked together, without beginning or end. The warm, animal smell of the butter candles filled the air as his humming rose and fell, creating the bizarre Tibetan polyphonic effect known as sygyt: that of sounding two notes at once with the same voice, made famous by the Tengyo monks, among whom he had studied.

  After thirty minutes of closed-eye chanting, the three enemies were gone, vanquished. Blackburn’s mind was empty of all hatred and desire, and receptive to it. He opened his eyes suddenly, very wide, and stared at the object in the candlelight.

  It was as if he’d received an electric current. His body stiffened, his muscles bulged, the cords in his neck tightened, his carotid artery pulsed. But his chanting never wavered, growing more rapid, moving into the higher registers, reaching an intensity of sound that was nothing at all like the normal tones of the human voice.

  He stared, and stared, and stared. A peculiar smell began filtering into the room, a nauseating, earthy smell, like rotting toadstools. The air seemed to thicken, as if filling with smoke, which drew together in a place about four feet in front of him, clotting like dark, viscous cream into something dense, almost solid. And then . . .

  It began to move.

  33

  IT HAD BEEN A VOYAGE FULL OF FIRSTS, THOUGHT BETTY JONDROW of Paradise Hills, Arizona, as she waited in the gilded lobby of the Belgravia Theatre, clutching a program book. Yesterday, she and her twin sister Willa had gone to the Sedona SunSpa® and gotten matching tattoos on their butts: hers of a butterfly, Willa’s of a bumblebee. Both had bought ankle bracelets of real diamonds in Regent Street, one of the ship’s two upscale shopping arcades, and they wore them every night. Who would have believed, Betty thought, that between them she and her sister had borne eight nine-pound babies and boasted eleven bouncing grandchildren? Thank God they had never let themselves go like so many of their high school classmates. She took great pride in the fact that, at sixty-three, she could still fit into her high school prom dress—an experiment she repeated religiously each year on the anniversary of the prom.

  She looked around again and checked her watch. Almost one o’clock in the morning. Where in heck was Willa? She had gone off to buy batteries for her camera at least half an hour ago. Maybe even longer.

  It was Willa who had been so anxious to meet Braddock Wiley, the movie star. One of the highlights of the cruise—and one of the reasons they had signed up—was the promise of a mid-atlantic premiere of Wiley’s latest horror movie. It was supposed to happen at ten, but Braddock Wiley, or so rumor had it, was suffering a bit from seasickness due to the rough weather.

  She scanned the crowd again, but still no Willa. Well, if she didn’t get there soon, Betty would just have to meet Wiley for both of them. She slipped a makeup mirror out of her bag, examined her face, touched up the corners of her lips with a hankie, snapped it shut, and slid it back.

  A sudden stir at the fringes of the group told her the wait had not been in vain. There was Braddock Wiley himself—dashing in nautical blue blazer, ascot, and cream-colored pants—striding into the lobby with several ship’s officers. He didn’t look sick at all.

  As soon as he saw the group of women he beamed and came over. “Good evening, ladies!” he said, reaching inside his blazer for a pen as the women, giggling and blushing, pushed their movie programs toward him. Wiley worked his way through the crowd, chatting with everyone, signing programs and posing for photographs. He was even more handsome in person than on the silver screen. Betty hung back, hoping for a last-minute appearance of her sister—but then, finally, there was Wiley, in front of her.

  “Last but not least,” he said with a wink, enveloping her hand in both of his and holding it warmly. “They told me there were going to be some fine-looking ladies on board. I didn’t believe them—until now.”

  “Come now, Mr. Wiley,” said Betty, with a sassy smile. “You can’t be serious. I have six grandchildren, you know.”

  His eyes widened in surprise. “Six grandchildren? Who could have guessed?” The movie star winked again.

  Betty Jondrow could find no words in response. Flushing to the roots of her hair, for the first time in half a century she felt that delicious sensation of being a blushing, virginal, confused schoolgirl once again, holding the hand of the captain of the football team.

  “Let me sign that for you,” said Wiley, slipping the program from her hand, signing it with a flourish, and then moving on with a final wave to the group.

  Betty raised the program and saw
he had written, “To my favorite smokin’ grandma—Love and French kisses, Brad Wiley.”

  She held the program in trembling hands. This was destined to be one of the high moments of her life. Wait until Willa saw this.

  Wiley was gone and now the theater lobby was starting to fill with dolled-up cinemagoers. Betty came to her senses; she had better claim two good seats, and fast. Willa may have missed Braddock, but she still had time to see the premiere.

  She showed her reserved ticket to the usher, went inside and found the perfect seat, right up front, and then claimed the next seat with her purse. The Belgravia Theatre was an extremely impressive space that took up much of the bow of Decks 2 through 5, very dark, trimmed in tasteful blue and amber neon, sporting plush, comfortable seats, a wide stage, and a deep balcony. Soon, despite its five-hundred-seat capacity and the late hour, the theater had filled. Within moments the lights dimmed and Braddock Wiley made another appearance, strolling out on the proscenium before the curtain, smiling in the glare of a spotlight. He spoke a few words about the film; told some amusing stories about the New York City production; thanked various producers, actors, writers, the director, and the special effects master; blew a kiss to the audience; and walked off. As applause filled the room, the 20th Century Fox logo appeared projected onto the curtains, and at that cue the curtains opened.

  The audience gasped. Betty Jondrow put her hand over her mouth. There, hanging directly in front of the screen, was a brilliant bit of stagecraft—a remarkably realistic dummy of a dead woman, dripping blood, illuminated by the projector. The audience broke into excited murmurs at this unexpected piece of drama, which must have been specially arranged to spice up the premiere. The dummy had been hidden behind the curtain to shock the audience. It was amazingly realistic—almost too realistic.

  The movie title came on, THE VIVISECTOR, the letters grotesquely illuminated across the body, with the word “VIVISECTOR” right on the chest, which indeed looked like it was the product of a botched operation. There were gasps of admiration from the audience at the clever, if revolting, juxtaposition.