The Bone Vault

35

We entered the museum on West Seventy-seventh Street, heading directly for the basement offices of the joint bestiary exhibition. I called Laura as we walked, and she patched me through to Clem.

“All quiet.”

“Give this one a try. Not a group mailing, but just to a few of them. The ones who’ve been answering personally. Tell them that the police want a sample of your DNA. Say that you’ve been told there was evidence that was found with Katrina’s body, okay?”

“Was there really-?”

“I don’t mean to be rude, Clem, but I can’t answer your questions now. I can only ask for your help.”

We sent her back to work and continued on our way. Security buzzed the group at work belowground, and minutes later, Zimm appeared to lead us downstairs. Mercer had arrived about a quarter of an hour earlier. The three of us left the graduate student in his office and made our way down the dark hallway to the conference room in which the Met curators were working. Erik Poste and Hiram Bellinger rose to greet us and Gaylord finished a telephone conversation before extending a hand.

“What’s this about DNA?” he asked. “You’ve got no business-”

“Put the brakes on, pal,” Mike said, motioning with his hand, suggesting that the three men resume their seats at the table. “Who was that you were talking to? Mamdouba?”

“No, that was Eve Drexler, actually. Something about taking evidence from us like we were suspects in this case.”

The old axiom had proved itself once again, only now the technology had changed. Telegraph, telephone, tell a woman. Clem had spread the word about DNA to Eve, and she had alerted her team between the time we got out of the car and down the stairs.

“Just a precaution, Mr. Gaylord. You see, every curator and worker at Natural History has to give a DNA sample.”

“That’s understandable, Detective. They’re working with animal specimens, doing genetic analysis and tracking evolutionary patterns. They can’t take the chance of confusing their own DNA with some relic or biological sample.” He had declined Mike’s suggestion to be seated and was pacing at the head of the table. “We work with art and ancient decorative objects,” he said, incorporating Poste and Bellinger in his response. “If you’re implying that I-I-we, had anything at all to do-”

Erik Poste tried to present a calmer face on behalf of the Metropolitan curators. “You make this sound like a game. Why don’t you tell us what you know, Mr. Chapman? If there was some legitimate purpose to this scientific exercise, I think we’d find a way to work with you.”

“Hey, I look like a man with time on his hands to play games? I got a girl who specializes in funeral exhibits and becomes one. I got an airborne man who goes off a flying buttress without wings or a safety net. I got a Scythian arm that fell into a jaguar den-you wanna talk exercise or you think maybe we got a job to do?”

“When we say we’re interested in DNA evidence, gentlemen, we’re not limited to blood and semen. Detective Wallace made an arrest last month in which the defendant was identified from saliva he left on the rim of a beer bottle at the crime scene,” I told them.

“And I popped a guy in a homicide because we got his skin cells on the doorknob of the victim’s bedroom.”

“Skin cells?”

“Yeah, they slough off, just when we’re holding on to something with ordinary contact. Windowsills, steering wheel of a car, the lid of a sarcophagus.”

Maybe it was just the close atmosphere in the windowless cubicle, but the three men seemed to be squirming.

“It’s painless, boys,” Mike said. “I’ll stop by the Met tomorrow with my Q-tips and plastic vials, and it will be over in a flash. Meanwhile, Mr. Gaylord, can we take you down the hall to ask you a few more questions?”

Gaylord sucked on the stem of his pipe as he followed me around to Zimm’s office. There was no tobacco in its bowl, so I assumed this was a habit of his.

“D’you mind if we displace you for a bit?”

“Not at all,” the young man answered. “By the way, Ms. Cooper, you know that girlfriend of Katrina’s I told you about, the one who moved to London?”

“Yeah. The one whose name you couldn’t remember.”

“Clementine. I just heard from her today. I guess you guys have already been in touch with her.” He looked from my face to Mike’s to try to draw a response.

“We’re trying to encourage her to come to Manhattan. We’re hoping she has some information that will help us solve the murder. We’ll talk about it later, Zimm, okay?”

Gaylord sat at the only desk in the room, his body perched sideways on the chair, one leg crossed over the other. The pipe seemed glued to his lower lip.

Mike was interested in basics. “Ms. Grooten was found in a coffin that was the responsibility of your department. You know more about the Egyptian collection than anyone in the museum. I expect there are things that you have control of that-”

“Look, Chapman, there were six or seven sarcophagi over here all the time. The shipments moved in and out regularly. Nothing anyone would take notice of. People here carted them around all the time.”

“Yeah, but you must have had special knowledge about how to do it. I mean, it took two of us to lift the lid on the piece the night we found it. How could anyone do that alone? Maybe I need you to tell us it would have taken more than one person to do that?”

“I assume you go to the movies, don’t you?The Ten Commandments?Cleopatra? You’ve seen all those slaves building the pyramids and hoisting the sphinxes into place. Weights and pulleys, Chapman, just like the old Egyptians. Put a rope around the top and slide it off,” he said, pounding on the desktop in front of him. “Drop your body inside, ease the lid back in place. A bit of privacy is all one needs.”

“Over at your shop, too?”

“You’ve seen the maze in our basement. I can’t say one would be any worse than the other. Let me ask you, has Mamdouba opened up his collection of mummies to you yet?”

“No, he hasn’t. I had no idea there were any here until today. Can you show them to us?”

“If I knew where they were, I’d have spirited some of my own out of here long before now. The Met sent some on loan half a century ago and we’ve not seen them since. They’ve got one of the most famous mummies in the world here. Copper Man. The copper oxide gives him a rather unique green cast. Comes from the Atacama Desert in Chile, where my conference was held this past week. A several-thousand-year-old miner who was pinned in a shaft while hammering for copper. J. P. Morgan bought him for this museum in 1905. Clem can tell you more about him than I can.”

That got Mike’s attention. “Clem? What do you know about Clem?”

“I heard Mr. Zimmerly mention her to you just now. What do I know about her?” Gaylord removed the pipe from his mouth and swiveled on the chair to answer Mike. “A real pain in the ass, Detective. I know her name is Clem, and she was fascinated with this Natural History mummy because he’d come from the Restaradora Mine. I believe she told me her father was a miner.”

Of course. Miner. Forty-niner. And his daughter, Clementine.

“Why did you find her so difficult?”

“Ms. Cooper, we run an art museum. The greatest in the world. It’s not a haven for activists and bleeding hearts whose mission is restoring the karma of people who’ve been dead for hundreds of centuries. We’re a shrine to the most superb paintings and sculpture ever created, masterpieces from every significant culture in the world.”

Gaylord had both elbows on the desk, his pipe bobbing in my direction. “That young woman hounded my staff mercilessly. What did she think we were going to do-send fifty thousand objects back to Cairo just to satisfy her and undo the mummy’s curse?”

“She wasn’t really inter-”

“May I remind you? The Temple of Dendur-that magnificent structure, the crown jewel of the Met-that entire monument would have been submerged under water when the Aswan Dam was built. We saved that temple, dammit. We brought it here in boxes-six hundred eighty-two of them. One for each carved piece of rock. Most of the treasures we have would have been destroyed if left in their own war-torn and decaying civilizations.”

“But the people themselves, Mr. Gaylord. I understood that Clem’s concern was with the remains of people.”

His free hand slammed on the desk. “Then what the hell does that have to do with me and my colleagues? We’re as different from a natural history museum as night and day-in function, in purpose, in style. Clem and her Eskimos, Clem and her sacred Indian burial grounds-they’re all Mamdouba’s problems, not ours.”

“These things don’t trouble you?”

“Mr. Chapman, I can’t change these facts, these histories. It’s quite simple. European culture has always been venerated in art museums. The culture of aboriginal people was relegated, like curiosities of science, to natural history museums.”

Gaylord stood up and replaced the pipe in his mouth. “There is a chasm between these two New York institutions that is far wider than the park that divides us geographically. In fact, the reason you find us all here today is because we’re trying to reverse the disaster that Thibodaux started. We’d like to call off this joint exhibition.”

“But there’s so much invested in it already.”

“Not nearly as much as Pierre had anticipated. UniQuest, the company that was giving us most of the commercial backing, is probably going to pull the plug. We got a call from Los Angeles today. Quentin Vallejo has put a moratorium on spending for the moment.”

If Nina had been trying to reach me with that news, I would have no way of knowing since my phone had been dead since the time we entered this basement area.

“A financial decision?”

“Basically, yes. I don’t think any of us shared Pierre’s enthusiasm for the plan. Besides, UniQuest is afraid of the bad publicity because of the Grooten murder. And apparently, while I was away last weekend, a man fell off the roof of the Met. They didn’t like that much, either.”

“Did you know him? Pablo Bermudez, I mean.”

He bit on the pipe stem. “Hard worker. Always busy. Never had much to say.”

Gaylord didn’t seem to care deeply about the human factor. Lucky Pablo didn’t splatter blood on any of the canvases when he hit the ground.

“So what will become of these offices and the objects that are here?”

“Anna Friedrichs is upstairs now, talking with Mamdouba. She’s going to try to convince him to carry on with his own bestiary show. He doesn’t need our input to pull this off. If we dissolve this union quickly and easily, we’ll start to transfer the Metropolitan’s objects back into our own quarters.”

How do you secure a potential crime scene that is closeted away somewhere within hundreds of thousands of square feet, when you haven’t yet identified the exact location? Better still, how do you do the same to two areas? I didn’t want anything moved out until we had a chance to examine every possible hiding place under this vast roof.

“You know,” Gaylord said, walking around us to open the door, “that Bermudez fellow was first hired by Bellinger. I think he lived up near the Cloisters. If I remember correctly, he’d been the super in Hiram’s building, which is how he was recommended to work with us. Maybe Hiram knows something about the man.”

I remembered the obit said he had lived with his family in Washington Heights.

Gaylord walked, hands in pockets and head down, along the hallway to get back to the joint exhibition office. Peering after him, I could see that Bellinger and Poste were gone.

I called Zimm’s name, and the bespectacled student emerged from a lab two doors away.

“Have you seen these guys?” I asked, thumbing my finger toward the empty room.

“They left a while ago. I told them I had another e-mail from Clem. She said she might be in town as early as tonight. She said Katrina must have found the vault she was looking for.”