Page 17 of The Cabinet of Dr. Leng

He put the highball glass down on the table with a sharp rap.

“So what about you? Just one day at a time?”

“Onedayat a time?” Now, at last, Pendergast’s lips twitched in a ghost of a smile. “Would that I had such luxury. No, my friend: my agony is measured not in days but in seconds. Even less. Not unlike a hummingbird.”

“I’m sorry?” Coldmoon wondered if the drink was messing with his reason.

As if on cue, the senior agent got up, went over to the drinks cabinet, and made himself another. “How much do you know about hummingbirds, Armstrong?” he asked as he settled into his chair again.

“Not much.” This was turning more bizarre by the minute. “They float in the air. They’re iridescent.”

“A hummingbird is perpetually starving,” Pendergast said. “They couldn’t even survive a single night without food if they didn’t enter a kind of nocturnal hibernation. Did you know that?”

“No.”

“As you said: they float in the air. That feat requires an incredibly fast metabolism. Their hearts beat sixty thousand times an hour. And their wings—” he paused to pick up his glass— “beat a hundred times a second. Ahundredtimes a second. If I’m to have any peace of mind, I cannot live day by day, only moment by moment. I live in the space of time between the beat of a hummingbird’s wings. Taking life at longer intervals…would be unendurable.”

He raised his glass again and drank deeply.

“And now I’ve kept you long enough. Thank you, my friend, for all your kindnesses—large and small. It is time we parted—for good.”

Coldmoon, feeling an odd lump in his throat, demurred.

“I never asked for a partner,” Pendergast said, “but in retrospect, I couldn’t have asked for a better one.Vale.”

There had to be something else to say before he left that darkened suite of rooms, but Coldmoon couldn’t think what it might be. “Tókša akhe,” he replied.

And then, as Coldmoon turned away, Pendergast laughed. This was so uncharacteristic Coldmoon turned back.

“What?”

“I was thinking of something you said, outside the door. You compared me to a potato, cooking in a bank of honey-locust embers.”

“That’s right.”

“The expression is new to me. Are they particularly good?”

“If you know what you’re doing, there’s nothing better. The embers of the honey locust emit just the right amount of heat to crisp the potato jackets, puffing them out like the skin of a Peking duck. And the potato itself is soft as butter.”

“Thank you for that gem of rural wisdom, Armstrong. Mind how you go.”

And as Coldmoon closed the door behind him, he could still hear the faint sound of Pendergast’s laughter—dulcet, melodious, yet infinitely sad—as he maintained his sanity by skipping from one tiny sliver of time to another, between the beat of a hummingbird’s wings.

11

THE FIRST THING COLDMOONnoticed on entering the Denver Field Office was the smell: for a fleeting moment, he was reminded of home. It was, he realized, an odor very similar to that of the long-boiled coffee that he favored. However, he soon learned the smell had nothing to do with coffee: it came from a mass of half-incinerated evidence hauled out of a counterfeiter’s shop in a raid and recently brought into the evidence storage room.

Denver was all he remembered it to be: the western vibe, the distant peaks, the bracing air. The Field Office itself was a long, low building with a façade of glass squares in shades of blue—unusual but attractive, like a mosaic. Even though it was Sunday, the government never slept, and he’d assumed someone from HR would be waiting to guide him through the red tape that came with a transfer, but to his surprise he was taken directly to the office of the Special Agent in Charge, Randall Dudek.

Dudek was on the phone when an assistant ushered Coldmoon in. The office looked toward the dun-colored suburbs rather than downtown. It was a smaller version of Assistant Director Walter Pickett’s office—down to the photos of the Capitol, Lincoln Memorial, and the FBI headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue, as well as the obligatory portraits of the president and vice president.

Dudek gave him a brief nod and swiveled his chair around so he was facing the trophy cases on the rear wall. This had the effect of leaving Coldmoon standing, bags in hand, staring at Dudek’s broad shoulders and closely shorn scalp. The call went on for several minutes. Finally, Dudek rang off, turned around, placed the handset on his polished desk, and folded his hands.

“Agent Coldmoon,” he said. “Have a seat.”

Coldmoon approached, put down his luggage, then sat in one of three identical chairs facing the desk.

“So,” Dudek said, “at last. The prodigal son returns.”

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