The Bone Vault

14

“Do you mean that Katrina Grooten worked with arsenic here at the Cloisters?”

Bellinger fidgeted now, swiveling in his chair as though he were looking for something north of the heavy traffic crawling across the George Washington Bridge.

“No, no, I can’t say that she did.”

“But a lot of the other staff members do?” Chapman asked.

He thought before answering. “I wouldn’t say very many. Four at the most. Those who work under my direct supervision. They’ll all tell youI’m the one who uses it most.”

“Why? In what form?”

“My particular scholarship is in the field of illustrated manuscripts.” He stood up and walked to some of the open volumes that had been moved to accommodate our gathering. “From the earliest monastic houses on, the production of books was an essential task the monks performed for the greater ecclesiastical community. Each of them had what was called a scriptorium, where scribes and illuminators copied classical texts. Here, in the building we call the Treasury, we’ve got a unique collection of these exquisite books.”

Bellinger picked one up and carried it back to us. “Certainly our most prized possession. Perhaps you know it. TheBelles Heures. ”

“Only from the museum catalog.”

“This one was described in the inventory of the Duke of Berry in 1413. These were made by the monks for the rich patrons and royal families, who were supposed to say their prayers at the same canonical hours that were observed in the monasteries-book of hours.”

The two pages he displayed were ornately decorated in gold leaf around the text of the prayers. There were stunning paintings in vibrant colors, and I studied the heavy pages before moving out of the way for Mike and Mercer.

“How has this survived in such good condition?” I asked.

“The books always suffered less damage than things like tapestries. They couldn’t be melted down into bullion, like jewelry or pieces of gold, so thieves and rogues didn’t perceive them to have very much value. It’s just that their colors fade over time, and we restore them here. That’s the work I like to do.”

“And the materials?”

“We try to imitate what was done in medieval times.” Bellinger pointed at parts of the elegant page. “Powdered gold for these elaborate drawings was made by grinding the actual metal with honey and mixing it with egg whites. Black came from a carbon-based ink. They made blue in a number of ways. The most expensive was actually ground from lapis lazuli, or indigo mixed with white lead-which is actually quite poisonous itself. And yellow, that’s where the orpiment comes in. The monks used saffron to produce a yellow pigment in the early days. But it wasn’t permanent.”

“What’s orpiment?”

“It’s an arsenic compound, Detective. Very widely used to give us a fine yellow color. You can see how effective it is right on that page you’re examining now. In our workshop downstairs, we’ve got more than enough to make someone quite ill.”

“Is it secured?”

“Do we keep it under lock and key? Of course not. Our little restoration area doesn’t get a lot of outside interest. It’s very intense labor and doesn’t excite much of the general public.”

“Did Ms. Grooten have access to the room?”

Bellinger paused for a moment. “Certainly. But she wasn’t in the habit of licking paintbrushes, Mr. Chapman.” He was beginning to snap at Mike.

“And Napoléon didn’t chew on his wallpaper, either.”

“What?” the puzzled curator asked.

“There was arsenic found in locks of Napoléon’s hair. Lots of it. There were theories that his captors did him in, and some wild conjecture that he was poisoned by the vapors from the wallpaper color in his room at St. Helena’s, during his exile. Copper arsenite.”

“Scheele’s green, probably. A brilliant pigment. We’ve got some of that, too. Don’t use as much of it because it wasn’t created until after the Renaissance, so it wouldn’t be authentic to our pieces.”

“That’s exactly why we need to know what Grooten was working on and who she dealt with,” I said. Mike knew more about the great Corsican general than Pat McKinney knew about the law. If he got off on a Napoléonic tangent, we’d be here until midnight. “I assume you have a way to tell us whether any tubes or vials are missing?”

“I’m sure I don’t. The workmen get all the supplies they need by ordering from the Met. Ask Pierre Thibodaux. Ask Erik Poste. Ask the other medievalists.”

His counterparts at the main branch were obvious interview subjects. “Why Thibodaux? Why Poste?”

“I’m sure the director’s office has all the billing records for the goods that are purchased for our needs. The ever-rigid Ms. Drexler must be able to put her fingers on that. There are a host of toxic substances in paints and pigments, varnishes and cleaning agents. And we’re not the only ones who restore old artworks, Ms. Cooper. Mr. Poste’s European collection has far more extensive restoration projects than do I.”

I didn’t think he was pointing the finger at other colleagues as much as he was highlighting how frustrating our search would be in an institution that apparently needed poisons to enliven the glorious holdings the public came to view.

“May we have this copy of Ms. Grooten’s personnel file to take with us?” I asked.

“I’ve reproduced the entire thing for you.”

I opened it from the back and saw the letter of resignation first. It had been written on a word processor and dated December 24 of the previous year. In place of a signature was the capital letterK, drawn with a marker in almost a stick-figure print.

“Is that how she usually signed things, not spelling out her whole name?”

Bellinger took the document from my hand. “Straight and simple, just like that. She usually used both initials, but herG was more Gothic, if you will.” He closed his eyes as if to call up an image of her signature. “TheG would have been harder to imitate, come to think of it, if someone else did the writing.”

I hadn’t suggested that the letter wasn’t written by Grooten. “Why would you think she didn’t write this herself?”

“I-uh, I don’t know. When did she die? I just mean she never came back to work after the twentieth, if I’m not wrong. Maybe she’d already been murdered, and the killer wrote this so I wouldn’t be worried about her disappearance.”

“And were you?”

“I was out of town that entire period, visiting my in-laws for the holidays. I never knew Katrina had quit until I returned in January. She was gone, and I thought she had left the country. There wasn’t much I could do about it until she sent me a forwarding address, as that letter said she would do once she got set up at home.”

“Did she have a computer when she was working here?”

“Yes, of course.”

“With an e-mail address?” I could see where Mike was going.

“So far as I know, the only e-mail address Katrina had was through the museum system. You’ll see in her file some correspondence that arrived for her after she left for South-” He caught himself. “After she resigned. We bought an entire new computer system, hardware and software, which was installed after the first of the year.

“When they dismantled Katrina’s equipment, I authorized the head of our management information systems to go into her account with her password, to make sure that nothing had come in for her that was related to museum business.”

“Did they find anything?”

“Minor correspondence, really. There were a few responses to requests for materials from museums overseas. We’ve got a good number of objects out on loan that she wanted to see photographs of, for their possible inclusion in the bestiary show. I forwarded those to the committee she had been working with. Gaylord, Friedrichs, Poste, and the others.”

“Anything personal?”

“Those should be in that packet you’re holding. A bunch of Christmas and New Year’s greetings from people she knew, here and abroad.”

I opened the file from the front this time, to skim through it to find those letters. I was arrested by the photograph of the young woman that appeared on the museum identification tag dated almost three years ago. The contrast to the Polaroid that had been taken the night we found the body was stunning. Grooten had smiled at the camera when she first came to work here, her face fuller and her light brown hair alive with chestnut streaks, as bouncy as a commercial for a home permanent.

I twisted the folder and showed the shot to Mercer, who shook his head.

“Something wrong?” Bellinger asked.

“I hadn’t seen her before, except the photographs made the night before last. I realize this was taken a few years ago, but is it a pretty good likeness?”

Bellinger reached across and looked at Grooten. “A very good one. Until last fall. That’s when she began losing weight and developed that awful pallor.”

Mike pulled the more recent picture from his jacket pocket.

Bellinger looked at it and again closed his eyes. “It’s not the way I like to think of her, but it’s certainly how she began to look by October.”

Perhaps Thibodaux hadn’t been lying to us. It was hard to imagine the physical transformation this young woman had undergone in the short months before her death.

“How about her apartment?” Mercer asked. “Did you ever check there to see what happened to her belongings?”

“My wife and I went to see the super in-let me think-it must have been the middle of January. When she was ten days late with that month’s rent, he called the museum. No one in his small building had seen her in weeks, and my secretary said she had resigned to leave the country. He cleaned out the apartment and rented it again before-”

Mike interrupted. “How about her things? Her belongings?”

“Katrina hadn’t accumulated much stuff. He figured she just bolted on her last month’s rent. She left no forwarding information, so the super held a tag sale in the building to get rid of what he could, and threw everything else out on the sidewalk.”

Mike was thinking about potential evidence. I imagined the possessions of the young woman’s life, meager as they were. Family photographs, treasured art books, perhaps an heirloom-a ring or bracelet that had belonged to an ancestor or friend. All discarded or sold for a few weeks of back rent in a cheap tenement building by a landlord who didn’t think to question her disappearance.

“This work that Katrina did, with medieval tombs and their sculpture, what was it exactly?” Mike asked. “Did shewant to do that, or did you assign it to her?”

“It was the specialty she chose, Detective.”

“Grim, wouldn’t you say?”

“Not as grim as your job, Mr. Chapman. That’s what most people in my line of work would think. Would you like to see what she was doing here? I can show you on our way out.”

Mercer took the Grooten file and we followed Bellinger back to the elevators and downstairs. Clouds were forming above us, casting shadows over the crosswalks in the cloistered garden. As we reentered the building on the far side from the tower, nearly every archway in the arcade seemed covered with fantastic animals.

“She loved those, Ms. Cooper. I’d often see Katrina out here, no matter how cold or wet the day, sketching these odd beasts.” He saw me slow my step to look up at the stone menagerie. “That’s a manticore-a man’s face, lion’s body, and a scorpion’s tail. Quite a combination, eh? And she’d had a cast made of that pelican, to use in the big exhibit. It pierces its own breast so that its blood, falling on its dead brood, can bring them back to life.”

We walked behind him into a two-story building at the southwest corner of the museum property. Mike whispered to me, “It looks like a stone deadhouse.”

I shivered at the sound of the words, an old name for a morguelike place where bodies are stored, and shuddered again at the cold interior of the Gothic chapel. Everywhere I looked, against each wall and in the middle of the room, were funereal monuments.

Bellinger clearly felt at home. “By the eleventh century, it had become quite fashionable in Europe for noblemen to commemorate themselves and their families with carved effigies. These tomb sculptures are what Katrina studied, back in France. Famous masons of the time would plan and execute these, including details of the patron’s coat of arms and the particular costumes and possessions of their ladies.”

“And Katrina, what did she do exactly?”

“Everything at the Cloisters, including the stones of the chapels themselves, was purchased from ruins in Europe and reconstructed here. Some were of provenances that were easily traced and proved, while others were just scraps of rock, vandalized as the monasteries broke up over the centuries. This poor fellow,” Bellinger said, crouching as he spoke, “was found facedown, being used as part of a bridge to cross a stream in the Alps.”

I kneeled beside him and rubbed my hand over the enormous black slab bearing the praying figure of a man.

“So Katrina studied the art form, learning who the sculptors were and how to recognize a particular style of carving or identifiable family traits. It’s a continuing effort to verify what we have, and to know when to purchase valuable pieces should they come up for sale on the European market.”

I circled the room, looking at all the dead figures in whose company Katrina Grooten had spent her days.

“These sarchophagi,” I said, gesturing at the many tombs that lined the walls, some piled on top of each other. “Are there more like these in storage?”

“Plenty of them.”

“Here?”

“Some here and some at the Met. They’ve got a vast basement, you know.”

“Any reason for Katrina to have some of the others shipped up to the Cloisters? I mean, from periods other than the Middle Ages.”

“She’s done it, I know. To compare styles. To help scholars who come here to research the way funereal art has changed over the ages.”

“Ever had any Egyptian pieces here?” Mike asked.

“I wouldn’t doubt it. Shipments come in and out from the Met all the time.”

Mercer was moving in another direction. “Was Ms. Grooten involved in anything controversial while she was here?”

Bellinger turned to walk us back toward the exit. “Not that I can think of. She didn’t normally operate at a high enough level to cross the big shots at the Met. The bestiary project was an exception, and there she was just on the committee acting in my stead. I wouldn’t have thought she’d ruffle any feathers while sitting in for me.”

Mercer was thumbing through the file as we moved along. “What’s the reference in here to the ‘flea market fiasco,’ two years back? It’s in a memo from you to Thibodaux.”

Bellinger stopped in his tracks. “The young scholars are so idealistic. It wasn’t a big deal. Katrina just had to be made to understand the commercial side of museum work.”

I repeated Mercer’s question. “What exactly was the fiasco about?”

“We got word-”

“Who’swe?”

“I was with Pierre Thibodaux and Erik Poste at a convention in Geneva. Word got around the place that one of those unusual finds had been made at a local flea market. A small medieval ivory, a carving of a hound chasing a rabbit, very similar to the large version that appears in the stonework outside.” Bellinger took a few steps. “I wanted it, for obvious reasons. And Thibodaux was willing to pay the price.”

“Was Katrina there?”

“Oh, no. But it’s a small world, this museum business. She had heard the rumor about the piece even before I flew back here. Anyway, we tried to buy the ivory but it was too late. It had been promised to the Copenhagen museum.”

“What was Erik Poste’s role in this?”

“Just that it made him furious while the squabbling about who would get the piece was going on, before the Danes firmed it up. Poste wanted Pierre to spend the money on something major for his European painting department rather than on some little rabbit that I coveted. A great portrait, or an artist like Bazille who’s underrepresented in the Met collection, rather than a six-inch piece of walrus tusk. We argued, but that happens among us all the time. You can’t hold a grudge around here, Ms. Cooper.”

“And the carving?”

The reclusive scholar smiled. “One of Thibodaux’s favorite smugglers-”

“Smugglers?”

“Yes, Ms. Cooper, you heard me. Pierre has a few favorites he relies on when he doesn’t get his own way with his checkbook. It’s an old tradition in this field. Anyway, Pierre’s man managed to get the piece out of Switzerland in about a week’s time, before the arrangements were made to ship it to Copenhagen. For his usual four percent commission. A month later, it was in one of our storerooms deep below Fifth Avenue.”

“You stole the carving.”

“Surely you don’t prosecute crimes that occur in Europe?” Bellinger laughed. “That’s been the nature of this work since museums first opened their doors. Some treasures came home in grand style, like Lord Elgin stealing the Greek marbles and setting them up for all the world to see in the British Museum. Others arrived more quietly and were bartered around town in secret. If there weren’t grave robbers and petty thieves, I’m afraid there would be far fewer works of art in public institutions everywhere in the world.”

“And your precious little object?”

“Will go on display after the summer. There wasn’t much of a scandal. We sent the Danes something of ours that they’d been longing for, and I got my ivory. All that was needed was a cooling-down period. People forget after a year or so. They quiet down.”

“And Grooten?”

“She learned as we all did. If you’re looking for a selfless way to help humanity, Detective, join the Red Cross. If you’re going to work in a museum, get used to the fact that most of what you see has been stolen from beneath someone’s nose. The great archaeologists who dug in Egypt and Turkey and Pompeii, they all believed what they recovered belonged to them personally. Took the urns and coins and jewels home to display on their own mantels and bandy about at their gaming clubs. Gave them away as gifts. Sold them to the highest bidder.”

I looked around the room at the assortment of tombstones from France, Belgium, Spain, and England. Lords and ladies at rest together, far from their intended graves.

“The spoils of war and the looted booty of imperial rule, Ms. Cooper. The Trojans did it, the British did it, the Germans did it, and may I add, even the American troops serving in the European and Pacific theaters did it during the Second World War. The only pretty part of this museum acquisition work is what you finally see behind the glass display cabinets.”

I was standing beside one such case, mounted on a pedestal, as Bellinger spoke to us. It held the upraised statue of a man’s arm, completely silvered and bejeweled, with its long golden fingers raised in a position of blessing. The legend at its base described it as the reliquary of a bishop, and I could see the crystal windows in the arm that once displayed his sainted bones. I wondered what had become of the rest of the poor man’s remains.

When we reached the top of the staircase through which we had entered, opposite the gift shop and the cloakroom, Bellinger started to say good-bye.

Mike withdrew a small glassine envelope from his pocket. “What kind of tickets do you use for checking coats here?”

Bellinger looked over his shoulder but there was no one inside. The day had been too mild.

“The usual. A small square with a number on it.”

“Like this?” Mike asked, showing him the stub that Dr. Kestenbaum had given to us.

“Identical. Ours are blue. All the city-partnered museums use the same system, just different-colored tags.”

“Who uses red ones? The Met?”

“No, they’ve got white ones, if I’m not mistaken. The one you’ve got there is from the Museum of Natural History.”