The Bone Vault

30

“What’s a bone vault?”

“Nothing you’re going to find in any museum directory, Mike. It’s how Katrina and I referred to the stash of skeletons that every museum has in one hideaway or another. The South African Museum in Cape Town, they’ve got a locked storeroom with more than a thousand cartons full of somebody’s grandmothers and grandfathers.”

“And the McGregor?”

“Up in Kimberley. One hundred and fifty dusty boxes of bones, sitting under white fluorescent lights.”

“None on display?”

“No. The curators got wise to the controversy a few years later than the Americans. Took down the hanging skeletons in the late nineties.”

“So, where’s the McGregor vault?”

“That’s the trick. She was going to try to find it and help to get the remains identified. To return them to the families that have been asking for them.”

Mercer was fascinated. “Can they actually be identified at this point?”

“Some can. I think there’s a new DNA process.”

“Mitochondrial DNA,” I told her. Tracing genetic material through the maternal line, through bone and hair.

“Katrina was to replace a woman who used to work at the McGregor, a friend of mine who had actually started to catalog the remains when they were taken off display three years ago. She had been doing this as a personal measure, hoping the day would come when the indigenous communities would be able to win their return.”

“This friend of yours started to inventory them?”

“You didn’t know how dangerous museum work could be, did you? Shortly after she undertook her project, she began to get death threats. First mailed to her office at the museum, then on her answering machine at home. Vague, of course, and anonymous, but good enough to scare her. She left South Africa and moved back to Kenya. It was after she left that the skeletons were all moved into storage and locked up.”

“Why? What had she found?”

“Very specific information. Some of the entries had names of the bodies attached to the labels, even specifying the farms from which the corpses had been dug up. Bones that could be given to family members to help restore their dignity and validate their existence.”

“And the others?”

“Simply an acquisition tag that says ‘Bush-Hottentot’ or whatever their local tribe was. They were considered subhuman, Mike. Their bones were displayed just as if they were animals. These people were denigrated in death as they had been in life.”

“So you’ve got an organization to get into the locked rooms and retrieve the bones?”

“That’s a very formal word for it, Mercer. Might be more accurate to call it a cabal. If we organized, there wouldn’t be one of us to get inside the employment office of any museum.”

“You enlisted Katrina?”

“I awakened her. I opened her eyes.” Clem looked down at her notebook on the table in front of her. “These were atrocities committed in the name of science and education, and some of us feel we can do something to right them.”

“Who else, besides Katrina, was involved with your work here in New York?”

She took a deep breath and shook her head. “You find out who killed her, and then I’ll give you specific names. I can’t put anyone else in harm’s way until you do.”

I placed my hand on top of her book. “It’s not just their help we need. How can we know whether or not they’re in danger if we don’t know who they are?”

Clem stood firm. “Let me sleep on it. Let me hear what you know and with whom you’ve already talked.” She raised her hand to cover her mouth, stifling a yawn, then stood and began to walk around the room, as if she were trying to shake off the jet lag. In London, it was well into the early hours of the next day.

“We should save some of this until the morning,” I said, signaling Mike to cut off the questioning.

“These partners of yours, how do you communicate with each other?”

Clem yawned again and I tapped my watch face as I looked at Mike and Mercer.

“So if we let you get some sleep, you game to come down to Alex’s office with us in the morning? Fill in the rest of these blanks?”

“That’s why I’m here.”

Clem walked us to the door of her suite, talking as she did.

“You must miss your job terribly,” I said, remembering that Clem had told me she had given up the chance to work in her field, temporarily, for the less controversial role of working in the exquisite refurbished Round Reading Room of the British Museum.

“I had my reasons,” she said, grinning. “It so happens that lovely library is directly above the African galleries. I’m not without my allies there. We’re still stirring up trouble.”

I arranged to pick her up at the Park Avenue entrance to the hotel in the morning, on my way down to the office, and we said good night.

“Ten-fifteen? I’m ready to eat the ferns in the lobby,” Mike said. “Anybody for dinner at Lumi?”

We drove the short distance to the chic little restaurant on the corner of Seventieth Street and Lexington Avenue, and Mercer followed in his car. Lumi herself took us to the corner table, next to the maître d’s stand, after I told her we needed a quiet place to talk about an investigation.

Over drinks we discussed Clem’s information and came up with a plan for the following morning. I would draft an e-mail for her to send to a group of museum employees, to see whether anyone could be drawn out to talk to Clem about Katrina.

Mercer and I had our favorite pasta-cavatelli with peas and tiny bits of prosciutto-while Mike took forever to work on the osso buco he ordered whenever we ate there. While we were waiting for our espresso, Mercer’s beeper went off. He excused himself and walked up the two steps from the restaurant door to the sidewalk.

He came back to the table to tell us he had to leave.

“It’s your girl, Alex. Angel Alfieri, the fourteen-year-old.”

The china cup clattered against the saucer as it dropped from my fingers. “They found her? Is she okay?”

“She’s alive. It wasn’t Felix-the cabdriver-that she went off with. Looks like she holed up with Ralphie, to make Felixand her girlfriend jealous.”

“Thank-”

“Don’t thank anybody yet. We got a hostage situation. She’s in Ralphie’s apartment, up on Paladino, and he’s holding a loaded gun to her head.”