Aloysius Pendergast


Aloysius Xingu Leng Pendergast is a fictional character appearing in novels by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. He first appeared as a supporting character in their first novel, Relic, and in its 1997 sequel Reliquary, before assuming the protagonist's role in the 2002 novel The Cabinet of Curiosities.
Pendergast is a special agent with the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation. He once worked out of the New Orleans Field Office of the FBI, but resides in New York City and works out of the New York Field Office; he frequently travels out of state to investigate cases which interest him, often those appearing to be the work of serial killers.

Background

Aloysius Xingu Leng Pendergast was born in early December 1960 and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana. Pendergast retains his Southern manners and mellifluous Deep Southern accent. He studied anthropology at Harvard University and received two D. Phil. degrees, one in Classics and the other in philosophy, from Balliol College, Oxford.
Pendergast once served with the U.S. Special Forces in the elite "Ghost Company", a spiritual successor to the "Blue Light" detachment with Michael Decker and Howard Longstreet, his superiors at the FBI, and Proctor, who later became his bodyguard and chauffeur. The symbol for this company was "a ghost on a blue field, decorated with a star throwing a thunderbolt at a cat's eye with the number nine as its pupil, symbolizing the nine lives members were alleged to have..." The motto was "Fidelitas usque ad mortem". Most of his military records are classified and unknown.
A number of years before the series began, Pendergast was married to Helen Esterhazy Pendergast. She was presumed killed in a hunting accident while in Africa, but reappears in the "Helen Trilogy".
Pendergast is generally described as being stoically aloof and eccentric, though his ineffable politeness and unerring intellect imbue him with an irresistible charm or enigmatic sense of danger if the occasion should call for it. Well-learned in many subjects, he converses easily with doctors, scientists, intellectuals, vagabonds, highly specialized masters of specific disciplines, and people of a wide variety of language and culture alike. He is a master of psychological manipulation, disguise, and improvisation.
Pendergast has a special intense disdain for officious pompous incompetent bureaucrats, and when he needs to approach them for one reason or another in his investigations, first does an in-depth study of their personal and professional lives, successfully using past corrupt, incompetent, or even criminal actions against them to get cooperation. Many find these scenes the most enjoyable in the books.
Pendergast appreciates the finer things in life, including expensive cuisine and wines. Food and drink he enjoys include Château Pétrus wine, antipasto, green tea of only the purest and most spiritual kind, gelato, and steak tartare. He has a great distaste for opera, and a disdain for the lobster roll, but will consume convenience store staples, like beef jerky, when tasks require such expediency. His interests encompass a wide variety of vastly differing walks of life, yet all focus on the enlightenment of the human mind, body, and soul. He spent a year in Tibet studying the deep meditative art of Chongg Ran, taught to him by the monks of the Gsalrig Chongg monastery.
Pendergast is polyglot, demonstrating mastery of French, Italian, Latin, Greek, and Cantonese, and appears semi-fluent in Mandarin. He also has some knowledge of Japanese and Portuguese. He communicates with one of his housekeepers, who is deaf and mute, using American Sign Language.

Appearance

Pendergast is always described as being tall and slender. He is fit, graceful in movement and physically powerful despite his slight frame. His skin is very pale and many people refer to him as "corpse-like" or as an "albino". He has platinum blond hair, and eyes that are most often described as silver or gray. Pendergast religiously dresses in black, bespoke suits made of a special blend of wool made only in the 1950s, thus he is often described as looking like an undertaker.
In many cases, Pendergast's normal appearance is irrelevant. A master of disguises, he has fooled even close acquaintances on several occasions.

Accoutrements

Pendergast owns a 1959 Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith. His chauffeur and personal assistant is a mysterious man named Proctor. All of Pendergast's suits are custom-made in Italy, and his shoes hand-made by John Lobb of London.
Pendergast's personal sidearm is usually a customized.45 ACP Les Baer Government Model M1911 pistol. In Relic he carried a.45 Colt Anaconda double-action revolver. He owns a Signature Grade Colt 1911 in.45 ACP tuned by pistol smith Hilton Yam.
Pendergast maintains an apartment at The Dakota in New York City, and later inherits and renovates a Beaux Arts mansion near Harlem from his great-granduncle in The Cabinet of Curiosities. In his Dakota apartment, which is actually three apartments combined, there is a full zen garden where Pendergast performs the tea ceremony and sometimes meditates.
Though he is a scrupulously scientific man, he wears a talisman or amulet on a chain, that consists of his own modified version of the Pendergast family crest: a lidless eye over two moons, one new and one full, with a phoenix.
Pendergast carries a variety of hidden tools, such as lock picks, flashlights of various sizes, test tubes, syringes, and forensic chemicals.

Friends and relations

  • Lt. Vincent D'Agosta – NYPD. Possibly Pendergast's most trusted friend and associate.
  • Constance Greene – Pendergast's ward, research assistant, social secretary, amanuensis, seer. An anachronism who appears 19, quietly beautiful with violet eyes and auburn hair, and possessing a depth of almost limitless knowledge. Born around 1876, her guardian and sister was experimented on and killed by Pendergast's ancestor, Enoch Leng, during his life-extending elixir process. Enoch informally adopts her at the age of six, while testing elixirs on her and raising her in his reclusive home as a student of erudite knowledge. When Enoch is brutally murdered, she hides in fear into the mansion and its catacombs, traveling only at night through the secret entrance to the Hudson River area of Riverside Drive. Although she has Svengali type feelings for Pendergast, she falls prey to his brother's psychotic seduction resulting in a child. The child is secreted away at the Gsalrig Chongg monastery, where, after her confession of love to Pendergast goes unrequited, Constance retires for a period. Constance returned to New York and was tried for the murder of her child and placed in the Mount Mercy Hospital for the Criminally Insane but later exonerated and released and began acting as a tutor and surrogate "big sister" to Pendergast's son, Tristram, in the 2012 novel Two Graves.
  • Proctor – Pendergast's butler and chauffeur with abilities far beyond most people's assumptions. Before becoming Pendergast's butler, he served in the Special Forces Ghost Company with him.
  • Wren – a book restorer at the New York Public Library.
  • Mime – an invalid of unknown affiliation, Thalidomide baby; skilled in obtaining obscure information via the computer and Internet. Also featured in Mount Dragon as the friend of Charles Levine.
  • Dr. Nora Kelly – New York Museum of Natural History curator; also featured as protagonist in Thunderhead,'' Old Bones, Scorpion's Tail and Diablo Mesa.
  • William "Bill" Smithback Jr. – New York Times journalist..
  • Captain Laura Hayward – New York City Police Department, married to Vincent D'agosta, not an avid fan of Pendergast's but will often assist in cases.
  • Dr. Margo Green – New York Museum of Natural History curator.
  • Dr. Viola Maskelene – an Egyptologist, love interest, later "just friends" forever and always as concluded in Two Graves.
  • The Monks of the Gsalrig Chongg Monastery.
  • Eli Glinn – president of Effective Engineering Solutions, Inc. Expert profiler who gets Pendergast to talk about his childhood and his brother. Also breaks Pendergast out of prison; also featured in The Ice Limit and the Gideon Crew series, beginning with Gideon's Sword.
  • Corrie Swanson – from Medicine Creek, Kansas, assisted Pendergast on a case in Still Life with Crows. Previously enrolled at Phillips Exeter Academy; enrolled at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Main character in White Fire. After graduating John Jay, Corrie enrolled with the FBI and is one of the main characters in Old Bones, Scorpion's Tail, and Diablo Mesa''.
  • Maurice – Former Caretaker of the Pendergast family mansion, Penumbra, in Louisiana, which has been sold.
  • Kyoko Ishimura – Pendergast's maid in the Dakota apartment.
  • Mrs. Trask - The housekeeper of Pendergast's mansion at 891 Riverside Drive.

    The Pendergast family

Officially, much of the Pendergast's family wealth came from pharmaceuticals, and the family was sufficiently old and established in New Orleans to conduct themselves as aristocracy. However, the fortune actually came from patent medicine, from which some of the customers suffered permanent injury or even death from its effects.
Pendergast also confides, to his shame, that a streak of insanity has afflicted his family for generations, such that many of them have been convicted of horrible crimes, and ended their lives in asylums.
  • Diogenes Dagrepont Bernoulli Pendergast – Pendergast's younger brother. As intelligent as Aloysius, if not more so, but allegedly criminally insane. Although he was always a unique child, Diogenes was pushed over the edge during a traumatic event during their childhoods, resulting in brain damage, heterochromia iridis, the inability to see colors, and the inability to sleep normally. Diogenes is first mentioned in Brimstone, after which he commits a series of grisly murders, for which he frames Aloysius, then a daring theft from the New York Museum of Natural History, to be completed with a horrific mass murder under circumstances similar to the "Event" during his childhood. Aloysius breaks out of prison with the help of his allies, only clearing his name later, and thwarts Diogenes' last crime. The three novels Brimstone, Dance of Death, and The Book of the Dead make up an internal series about the unique fraternal relationship between Aloysius and Diogenes, culminating in the latter's fall into the Sciara del Fuoco in the Stromboli volcano. These are known as the "Diogenes Trilogy". Sherlock Holmes fans will undoubtedly recognize Preston's and Child's homage to Doyle's famous works, in both their choice of first name for Aloysius Pendergast's brother, and in the circumstances of Diogenes's presumed demise. Diogenes reappears, seemingly a changed man in The Obsidian Chamber, claiming that he wants to live out a long, quiet life with Constance at Halcyon Key. After leading him on and joining him at Halcyon, Constance gives Diogenes a humiliating refusal, part of her cruel plan to get revenge; his whereabouts are currently unknown.
  • Cornelia Delamere Pendergast – Pendergast's great-aunt, who poisoned her husband, brother and children. Cornelia held residence at the Mount Mercy Hospital for the Criminally Insane until her death. Despite her complete insanity, Pendergast still considered her wise, and sought her counsel when he had a dilemma. Sometime during the events of Fever Dream, Cornelia dies, leaving Pendergast a letter of unknown content.
  • Antoine Leng Pendergast – Pendergast's great-grand uncle. Traveled north to New York after being expelled from the Pendergast family because of his pursuit of "unacceptable" and heinous acts involving obeah and voudou. Taxonomist and chemist as well as a member of the New York Lyceum in the late 19th century. Exposed as a serial killer in The Cabinet of Curiosities who killed in the pursuit of a substance that would prolong his life. He succeeded, and survived well into the late 20th century until he was murdered in his home on Riverside Drive. Pendergast now lives in Leng's old mansion with Proctor as butler/chauffeur and Mrs. Trask, the housekeeper. He has refurnished the mansion and made it liveable and elegant, though dim, as the shutters are always closed.
  • Hezekiah Pendergast – Antoine's father. Was a traveling salesman who contributed greatly to the family fortune by selling a quack medicine known as "Hezekiah's Compound Elixir and Glandular Restorative". The tonic was eventually exposed as a lethal blend of cocaine, acetanilid, and alkaloid botanicals. It was the cause of uncounted addictions and deaths, including that of Hezekiah's wife and Antoine's mother, Constance Leng Pendergast.
  • Henri Pendregast de Mousqueton – a "seventeenth-century mountebank who pulled teeth, performed magic and comedy, and practiced quack medicine."
  • Eduard Pendregast – a "well-known Harley Street doctor in eighteenth-century London."
  • Comstock Pendergast – Pendergast's great-grand uncle. Famed mesmerist, magician, and mentor to Harry Houdini. Eventually murdered his business partner and his family. He then committed suicide by cutting his throat twice.
  • Linnaeus Pendergast – Pendergast's father, who was killed in the fire.
  • Isabella Pendergast – Pendergast's mother, also killed in the fire. Her maiden name is Fawcett.
  • Boethius Pendergast – Pendergast's great-grandfather. Lived at the Penumbra plantation about an hour outside New Orleans, was good friends with famed naturalist painter John James Audubon.
  • Helen Pendergast – Pendergast's deceased wife. Helen was a doctor with Doctors With Wings, a group similar to Doctors Without Borders that travels to third-world countries and disaster areas to help people who would have otherwise had little chance of survival. She is a skilled big game hunter, and it was one of the activities that she and Pendergast did together. For many years, she was thought to have been killed on an African safari, but she reappears in the book Cold Vengeance. Helen is killed in the next installment of the series "Two Graves." She is a descendant of the Hungarian Esterházy aristocratic family.
  • Judson Esterhazy – Pendergast's brother-in-law. A neurosurgeon and avid game hunter, lived in Savannah, Georgia. Like his sister Helen, he was a doctor with Doctors With Wings and was a skilled hunter. He plays an important role in the "Helen Trilogy" but was killed in "Two Graves.".
  • Percy Harrison Fawcett – Pendergast's great-granduncle on his mother's side. He was an explorer and disappeared in the jungles along the Upper Xingu River in 1925 while looking for the mysterious Lost City of Z.
  • Tristram – Pendergast's son with Helen. Pendergast learns of him, and Alban, when they are 15 years old, in "Two Graves." Tristram, the name chosen by Pendergast, attends boarding school at École Mère-Égliseq in St. Moritz, Switzerland.
  • Alban – Identical twin of Tristram, a genetically engineered person, more intelligent and stronger than his father. Deceased as of the events in Blue Labyrinth.
  • Unnamed nephew - a child of Diogenes Pendergast and Constance Greene, born at and raised by the monks of the Gsalrig Chongg monastery, he is the 19th rinpoche. He was spirited away to India, by monks with the help of Pendergast and Constance, to protect him from enemies of Tibet.