Cold Vengeance - Lincoln Child [66]
Gliding down the stairs, Pendergast examined the dining room just as thoroughly as he had the upstairs, followed by the den. There he noted a safe in the wall, hidden behind a diploma. This was saved for later exploration. He opened and searched the gun case, finding nothing of note.
He finally moved into the living room, the most exquisite room in the house, with burnished mahogany wainscoting, antique wallpaper, and a number of lovely eighteenth- and nineteenth-century paintings. But the pièce de résistance sat against one wall: a heavy Louis XV breakfront displaying a collection of ancient Greek red-figure pottery.
He searched the room, ending at the breakfront. A quick twist and the lock was broken. He swung open the doors and examined the contents. He had long known of the collection, but once again he was struck by just how extraordinary it was, perhaps the finest small collection of its kind in the world. It consisted of only six pieces, each one a priceless, irreplaceable example of the work of an ancient Greek artist: Exekias; the Brygos Painter; Euphronios; the Meidias Painter; Makron; the Achilles Painter. His eye traveled over the vases, bowls, kylixes, and kraters, each an incomparable masterpiece, a testament to the highest and most rarefied artistic genius. This was not a collection assembled for show or prestige: these pieces had been painstakingly collected at astonishing cost by a person with a faultless eye and a profound appreciation. Only someone who truly and deeply loved the work could have amassed a collection so perfect, the loss of which would impoverish the world.
The sound of ragged breathing gradually filled the room.
With a sudden, violent movement of his arm, Pendergast swept the collection off the shelves, the heavy ceramics tumbling to the oak floor and shattering into hundreds of pieces, the fragments skittering and bouncing everywhere. Gasping with effort, possessed by an explosion of fury, he smashed the pieces underfoot into smaller and smaller ones, eventually grinding them into grit.
And then, except for the sound of heavy breathing, all was silent once more. Pendergast was still weak from his ordeal in Scotland, and it took some time for his breathing to return to normal. After a long while, he brushed some pottery dust off his suit and moved stiffly toward the basement door. Forcing it open, he descended and conducted a careful inspection of the cellar.
It was mostly empty save for a furnace and plumbing. But off in an alcove stood a door that, when forced, revealed a large wine cellar, lined in cork, with temperature and humidity controls mounted on one wall. He stepped inside and examined the bottles. Esterhazy had an exceptional cellar, mostly French, and favoring the Pauillacs. Pendergast ran his eye over the long columns of bottles: Lafite Rothschild, Lynch-Bages, Pichon-Longueville Comtesse de Lalande, Romanée-Conti. He noted that—while his own wine holdings at the Dakota and Penumbra were far more extensive—Esterhazy had a first-class collection of Château Latour, including several bottles from the very greatest vintages that were missing from his own cellars.
Pendergast frowned.
Selecting the best vintages—the 1892, 1923, 1934, the fabled 1945, 1955, 1961, half a dozen others—he pulled them from their niches and placed them carefully on the floor. He chose no wine younger than thirty years. It took four trips to gently carry them all up to the den.
Leaving them on a side table, he fetched a corkscrew, decanter, and oversize wineglass from the kitchen. Back in the den he opened each bottle of wine in turn, letting them air upon the sideboard while he rested from his exertions. It was dark outside now, a pale moon hanging over the palmetto trees of the square. He glanced at the moon for a moment, recalling—almost against his will—that other moon: the first moonrise he and Helen had shared. It had been only two weeks after they’d first met. It was the night on which their love for each other had been so passionately revealed. Fifteen years ago—and yet so