The Bone Vault

39

Cops were swarming in and around the fifth-floor offices and storage cabinets. Even with the overhead lights switched on, the hallway was all dark corners and angles, old wooden cabinets with broken drawer pulls filling the wide spaces between doors, and exhibits shrouded in plastic drop cloths covering every flat surface.

I could hear Mike’s voice a football field or two farther down the way, yelling orders to try to organize the crew that was racing about, testing and yanking doorknobs while waiting for security guards with passkeys to let them into every locked entryway.

Socarides turned a corner and charged off in a perpendicular direction. I shouted to Mike to follow us and kept running after my determined guide.

The passageway led deep into the museum’s interior. Our footsteps echoed in the immense space of our surroundings, while Mike trotted behind us, calling Clem’s name every few seconds. None of this area was accessible to the public. Cool, dark, and dry, it seemed as remote from the popular displays of the forty exhibition halls that enchanted busloads of schoolchildren as the tip of the Empire State Building appeared looking up at it from the sidewalk.

We stopped behind Socarides at the old-fashioned door of a small room. It was a solid panel of oak with a foot-wide glass window at eye level. Black lettering that once announced the occupant’s name had long ago been scraped off the pane. The handle wouldn’t give. I stepped back and Socarides smashed against the glass with his flashlight, reaching in to open the door.

Inside the dreary room, I found the switch and turned on the lights. Fish skeletons. Thousands of them. Stained with a pinkish dye now familiar to me, they emitted a supernatural glow as they rested upright in bottles filled with ethyl alcohol, from the floor of the room to the fourteen-foot ceiling.

Chapman and Socarides were ahead of me, moving farther along the seemingly abandoned hallway, shattering window after window to get inside cubicles and cabinets, eyeballing their contents, as they worked their way toward a dead end.

“Next one over. This stuff used to be up here, I know,” Socarides called to us. We ran back to the main hallway and down another lifeless wing of storage space.

Four more tries at small, dreary rooms yielded an incalculable number of drawers filled with the still bodies of birds. Feathers, beaks, bills, and tiny little vertebrae everywhere.

Mike slammed the last one behind him and stopped to take a deep breath.

“Here, Detective. Over here.”

I followed Mike a few yards farther down the corridor to the twelve-by-twelve-foot storeroom into which Socarides had hacked his way. Both of us stepped inside.

Human skeletons, six of them suspended full length, hung in a row facing the entrance door. Each of the macabre sextet was hooked at the base of his cracked skull by a shiny brass hinge that attached to the top shelf, several feet above our heads.

Long, bony fingers met me at eye level, dangling from the chalky remains of these forgotten souls. I half expected them to lift in unison and reach out to grasp some part of my neck or throat.

Behind them and on each of the walls of this secluded den were stacks and stacks of bones. I swiveled to my left to get out of Mike’s way as he ran his flashlight up and down the space beside the door, looking for light switches. Now I was facing three rows of skulls, human heads with protruding teeth, hollow cheeks, and black sockets that once held eyes which would have returned my stunned gaze dead-on.

“What’s here? What do you know about this?” Mike asked.

“It is Willem Van der Poste, Erik Poste’s father,” I said.

The beams of our three flashlights probing up and down the shelves made it even creepier. I directed the light to the far side of the room to find more skulls, these with hair still clinging to the decaying scalps.

“Some of these were his. The man amassed a huge collection of African artifacts. But he did it in the employ of dozens of different patrons. Great white hunter kind of thing.”

“This his private vault?”

“No, no. He never had the money for that.”

Leaving that door open, Socarides led us to the adjacent space, letting Mike break into it and scan for better light while he talked. “Rich trustees and museum aficionados back in the twenties and thirties made pilgrimages to the Dark Continent. Some for big game, some for the sheer excitement, some to plunder the ivory and gold and rubber.”

More bones. The rest of the bodies that must have connected, at one distant time, to the forlorn heads in the room we had just left. Bones in boxes, neatly labeled with a first name or a tribe designation or a simple question mark.

“Willem’s father was a Boer. Went to South Africa at the turn of the last century. Developed a reputation as the most spectacular shooter of the lot. Bagged half the beasts that made up the basis of the original museum collection here. The man to see, in Africa.”

Into a third room, stacked again with human remains. Mike stepped back into the hallway and cupped his hands, yelling for reinforcements, then asked, “Whose rooms are these?”

“They’re not designated as anyone’s. These-thesethings are just waiting here for someone to decide what becomes of them in this age of political correctness. There-up there, Detective.”

Socarides’s flashlight stopped on something that glinted in the dark. Mike grabbed a bookcase wedged into the space behind the door and slammed it to its side, skulls scattering across the floor. He climbed onto its edge, two feet off the ground, to reach the top few tiers of shelves.

Guns. A rack of hunting rifles spread out across the uppermost space. “Eight of ‘em up here. Looks like there were a couple more here once, if this was ever full.”

He wiped his hand to see what amount of dust had accumulated in the several inches that separated the long guns from each other. One level below were pistols and handguns. No way of really knowing how many had been on the shelf earlier than today and whether any had been taken recently.

Mike stood on his toes and reached behind the row of pistols now clearly visible to me as I tried to give him more light.

“This one of yours?” He balanced against the sturdy wooden shelf with one hand, handing me a couple of the guns while pulling into Socarides’s view the tip of an elephant tusk that must have been four feet long.

“Ivory, Detective. Willem Van der Poste’s private insurance policy, if I had to guess. Every hunter had a stash of some sort or other, and his tusks were probably hidden here against the day he’d get back to the States and need to convert them into cash. Sell them on the black market.”

Mike backed down off the shelf. “Got a few of ‘em up there. Worth what?”

“Fifteen, maybe twenty thousand apiece. Maybe more.”

“Nobody back there, Chapman,” a cop called in after checking the rooms beyond us.

“Open every room. Check every inch of this place.” The uniformed cops hustled as Mike gave out orders. “Where to?”

Socarides was running out of ideas. “Maybe he got her out of the museum. Maybe they’re not-”

“That’s great. I’ll let you know when the chief gives me that news. I’m a worst-case scenario kind of guy. I don’t feature ‘em on the Jitney, on their way out to the Hamptons. Where else could you hide inside here? Where else would-?”

“The basement. I mean, there are several basement areas, each separate and-”

“I know. We got people down there.”

“There’s the attic, above us. Vast spaces, locked storerooms. No reason for anyone to be up there, no one to disturb them once they got there.”

“Can you get to it from the staircase in Mamdouba’s office?”

“Frankly, I didn’t know there was a staircase in his office. No idea where that leads.”

Back to the main hallway, Mike was running ahead of Socarides and me, screaming to security guards to point him to the access to the attic. The older man nearest that end of the building was clearly so intimidated that the keys jangled in his grip as he tried to work them in the lock of the massive door. I laid a hand on his forearm and asked him to give them to me, which he seemed eager to do. When I found the right one, Mike leaned against the panel and headed up the stairs.

Again we followed. Still enveloped in the semidarkness, I tried to orient myself to our location, after having altered our route so many times downstairs. Uniformed cops were coursing through the immense space. If anything could rattle the bones and wake the dead, it would be this stampede of cops who were entirely at home on urban streets, in subway stations, housing projects, and city parks, but thoroughly perplexed by this labyrinth of hidden rooms and concealed closets.

Chapman had gotten his bearings before I did. “That’s southwest,” he said, pointing. “Mamdouba’s office. That would be the corner the staircase would lead up from.”

He took off in that direction and I loped behind him. “Coop, give it a whistle.”

I put two fingers in the corners of my mouth and blew as hard as I could, the cab-stopping kind of signal that could be heard blocks away, that Mike had never mastered. He called out after I got the attention of half of the troops. “Over here. Move all this shit, all these cabinets that are blocking doorways. Anything obstructing any entryway or exit. We’re looking for a woman’s body. Breathing or not. Find her. The guy may be packing.”

There must have been eight or ten attic areas like this over the entire complex of buildings that made up the museum. This was only one of them. Although it led out of Mamdouba’s corner turret, there was no way to tell whether it connected to the rambling set of contiguous halls.

“Soc, what’s up there?”

Under the eaves, still high above our heads, was a steel catwalk. It was not much wider than a balance beam, with chain guylines that bordered it as it crossed the width of the immense room.

“Never been there, never noticed it. Must be for maintenance, for structural repairs.”

“Hey, Pavlova, you wanna be useful? Make all those ballet lessons your old man paid for worthwhile? I don’t think my feet’ll fit on the damn thing.”

I loathed heights as much as I hated vermin, snakes, and spiders.

“Bird’s-eye view, Coop. Different perspective. Give it a shot.”

I stepped out of my shoes, handed my flashlight to Mike, and started to climb the rusty rungs of the ladder that was welded in place against the south wall of the room. The metal dug into the middle of my soles as I climbed higher, trying to focus my eyes on a water-stained spot on the wall above my head. Anything not to look back down.

The solid plank felt good beneath my feet. I glided out onto it, clutching the side rails with all the strength in my hands, and moved forward by planting heel in front of toe in a regular cadence.

The first stretch was the most unsettling, from the wall more than twenty feet across to the first block of storerooms. The open space below me was more than twice that height.

I paused to look down at the tops of the structures below. Some appeared to be permanent fixtures, sizable rooms that must have been built into the original architectural plans for the storage of items and artifacts not on display. They were topped by strips of wooden board, and although it was impossible to see whole objects in between the slats from this distance above them, I could make out the shapes of large, dark masses as well as the occasional glimpse of something that contrasted with that, something light. The whiteness of bones was what it looked like to me.

I propelled myself ahead, stopped, and noted that there were other, more modern cabinets-gray metal lockers that looked like they had been added as the collections outgrew the original design space.

Then I was out over open hallway again, clinging to my side railings and measuring my steps. Storerooms and cabinets. More open corridor. Storerooms and-

I froze over the third cluster of storage rooms. I looked down. Shadows and opaque radiance coming through the skylights that dotted the eaves above me danced atop all the surfaces I saw below. I steadied myself with both hands and crouched lower.

I was sure of it now. It wasn’t the flutter of white clouds or the brilliance of the moon from the skylights. It wasn’t the confusion of dozens of flashlight beams intersecting one another from the floor far beneath me.

Something had moved in the darkness. Something in one of the vaults.