The Bone Vault - Linda Fairstein (31 page)

Every head in the room seemed to respond to that bluff. Mamdouba was the first to jump at the bait. "So, the people here at the museum that we spoke of on Friday, you've located them?"

"It wouldn't be wise to identify our witnesses to you, sir. We've had some contact with a few of her acquaintances in other lines of work, too. One of the things that has us a bit stymied are the differing snapshots of her personality."

"You mean before she became ill versus afterward?" Bellinger asked.

"No. There are those who have described her as very quiet and, well, meek and shy. Others have said she could be feisty if she was passionate about something. You, Mr. Poste, and you, Ms. Friedrichs, each described her differently. We're trying to account for that. See if you can tell us what her passions were, exactly."

Poste spoke first. "As I told you, I only knew Katrina as a serious young scholar, a bit aloof, if I had to use one word to describe her." "I'm the one who told you she had another side," Anna Friedrichs said, clasping her hands and leaning forward on the long Formica table. "I certainly saw it. Hiram, I think you did, too."

"Well, there was a good deal more of it in evidence before the attack. Before she was raped, I mean."

"Raped?"Poste asked. "You mean the killer raped Katrina?"

"No, no. Not that I'm aware of. Is that right, Detective?" Bellinger looked at Chapman. "When she was raped in Fort Tryon Park last year, leaving work."

"I never knew about that," Mamdouba said.

"Neither did I," Poste was quick to add.

Anna Friedrichs was annoyed. "I told both of you, I know I did." The two men looked at each other and were either truly puzzled by her statement or had a similar talent for playing dumb. "Erik, really. Elijah. I made a point of telling you and asking you to keep the confidence. I was afraid she'd be jumpy if she was alone in this place late at night."

This was exactly what Mike wanted to happen. He wanted to divide the united front, which was most often an artificial response to the unwelcome entry of a law enforcement agency, and find out what fractionalized these colleagues. What drew the fire in the belly of both museums, where ninety percent of their collections lay under wraps? "It's clear Katrina had a long-standing interest in medieval art. That was her training and education. That's what she came to the Met to do. And yet here she was, leaving New York and returning to Africa in December to pursue an entirely new direction."

"If I may say, Miss Cooper"--it was Mamdouba speaking--"I believe it was her father's health that was the main reason for her decision to go home."

A bit late for that, I thought to myself. Something else had to be at the bottom of her change of focus. I counted on Clem to help us figure that out later tonight, but we also needed to see what these curators thought.

"We haven't heard from you, Mr. Socarides. Tell us your impressions of Katrina."

He had seemed content to be resting his head against the back of his chair, letting the others take the lead. He sat upright, slowly. "Never met her until we started to put the show together. Loved her animals, the girl did. Endeared herself to me."

"What was it about them that you think attracted her?"

"Who doesn't like animals, Ms. Cooper?" He became animated, wagging a finger at me. "Now on your television crime shows,that would be your serial killer. Someone who hated furry creatures, tortured them as a child. Isn't that always the way to find the killer?" "I'm talking about the victim for the moment. What was it she liked about your animals?"

"This exhibition is all about animals, young lady. Katrina found examples of dozens of symbolic beasts from her medieval art, and then I introduced her to the real ones. Okapi, elands, Grevy's zebras, reticulated giraffes."

"Dead ones."

"Well, obviously, Mr. Chapman. This is a museum, not a zoological society."

"The ones you stuff for display?"

"Precisely."

"She ever watch you--or your staff--prepare one of those mountings?"

"No. Not that I'm aware of. The beasts and the bones, she liked both of those. I don't think she liked the whole process of using the skins to re-create the animals. A bit too Hannibal Lecter for her, I'm sure."

"What do you mean by `the beasts and the bones'?"

"Well, Ms. Cooper, Katrina loved the animals. They were all African, keep in mind. Maybe that's what she liked. And she had a real fascination with the bones. Never tired of looking at the bones. Wanted to know everything I knew about the bones."

Millions of them, as I recalled. Not so unusual, I thought to myself, for a woman whose specialty was funerary art.

"And I must interject, Anna," Socarides said, before he slumped back into his seat. "Nobody ever told me the girl had been raped. I don't know what you're making such a fuss of it for."

"I never claimed to have toldyou about it, Richard. I had no idea she was so taken with your, your... beasts," she said dismissively. Anna was determined to show off her close relationship to Katrina. "In fact, I had no idea you'd paid her a bit of mind outside this room."

It was ordinarily my habit to interview each witness alone, which we would attempt to do later on, but Mike's idea to bring the group together brought out talons on each that might not have been visible one- on-one.

"You seem to think you had the market cornered on her friendship, Anna. She was actually quite surprised to learn how weak the Met's history was in your very own specialty, African art."

"Katrina was hardly what I would call African, would you, Elijah? She was Dutch. Boer. About as primitive as Erik." Anna laughed at her inside joke.

"Are you Dutch, too?" I asked Poste, remembering that Ruth Gerst had told us his father was a great explorer and hunter who had taken museum trustees on African safaris and shoots.

"Yes, by birth. But we moved here when I was a child, and I grew up in the States." He seemed embarrassed by the petty squabbling among the museum staff members.

"What did Mr. Socarides mean when he said your department at the Met was weak?"

Anna went on, "Until very recently in museum terms-- the late 1960s--the Metropolitan had no interest in what we call the primitive arts. We were terribly underrepresented in my field. The trustees at the time looked on all of it as sort of airport art--Mayan sculptures, African masks, New Guinea ancestor poles. It wasn't until Nelson Rockefeller gave his entire collection to the museum that we began to be competitive in this field."

Mamdouba's irrepressible grin reemerged. "Ah, tell the truth, Anna. Most of your distinguished trustees think all these aboriginal faces belong inour museum, don't they?"

Bellinger and Poste had to smile along with him. But Anna snapped, "These are works of art, Elijah, every bit as beautifully crafted as the sculptures of the ancient Greeks. In your museum they just become cultural specimens, totem poles stuck next to igloos and canoes."

"I'm glad Timothy Gaylord isn't here," Socarides said. "He'd be apoplectic hearing you compare some of those drooping-breastedNational Geographic figures of yours to his precious Egyptian carvings."

Mamdouba bowed his head in my direction. "This is a centuriesold dispute, Miss Cooper, not likely to be resolved today. Miss Friedrichs and I often battle for acquisitions. My colleagues and I believe that primitive objects are much better respected under our aegis."

Friedrichs walked to the coffeemaker and refilled her cup. People shuffled papers and pretended not to notice the silence.

Mike Chapman tried another topic. "I'm gonna ask you to do some word association now. What do you think of when I say the wordvault ? What does it mean in your work, or in the museum?"

Friedrichs didn't want to play anymore. She looked straight ahead and ignored the question. I thought of her disorderly conduct arrest and imagined her planted in the middle of the street with her picket sign in defiance of police instructions to move on.

Erik Poste leaned forward, his hand on his chest. "I suppose I can give you the definition, Detective. It's an architectural term, illustrated quite often in paintings. In fact, you both saw vaulted areas the day we took you around the basement of the Met. Vaults are a series of arches that radiate from a central point, used to make a roof in a building's interior."

"In my business, that's what the medievalists called burial chambers. They were mostly underground, in churches and cathedrals, so they were called vaults," Bellinger said.

"Funny how it conjures such a different image to me," Socarides said. "Those are our storage cabinets. I've got my assorted mammal bones in tusk vaults and boar vaults and shrew vaults. But then, Erik's my expert on museum history, if that's what you're looking for. Grew up in these places--it's in his blood."

I thought again of our conversation with Ruth Gerst about Poste's father. Erik might be the one to know something about private vaults.

"I understand that there are some personal storage rooms that wealthy contributors were able to keep in the museums." I looked to Mamdouba. "Might you have a list of those names?"

"Not here, madam. We've had no such thing that I'm aware of." The smile had vanished and he was quite firm in his denial.

"Are you saying you're not aware of any, or that there aren't any? I'm going to ask you to check with President Raspen and consult your archives. Surely, Mr. Poste, you know something about that tradition."

Everyone turned to stare at Erik Poste. "I, uh, I know they've been rumored to exist at the Met. Three or four of them at most."

Mike wanted to prove to the group that he had this on better information than rumor. "The Arthur Paglin vault. Others like that?"

Poste shrugged his shoulders. "Paglin had the great Egyptian collection. Gaylord would know more about that than I do."

"What became of your father's collections?" I asked Poste, who had pursued such a different line of scholarship from Willem, as Ruth Gerst had described it to us.

"You know about him, do you?" He looked pleased that I was familiar with his father's work.

"Not very much. But I've heard he made great contributions to this museum."

"I was twelve years old when he died, Miss Cooper. Killed by native poachers when he was leading an expedition. Greedy and ignorant men who took his life simply because he stood between them and some ivory animal horns. Killed because of the power of their superstition. My older brother, Kirk, remained on, in Kenya, doing my father's work. He'd be the one to ask about my father's contributions."

"You didn't stay in Africa?"

"I was sent off to boarding school in New England. My mother's health was quite fragile. She was hospitalized for long spells while I was growing up. I developed a preference for art, which was Mother's influence." "Are any of your father's things here, in the Natural History museum?"

Poste extended his hand, palm upward, deferring to Mamdouba. "Oh, surely. Many, many of our finest African exhibits were brought back to us by Willem. I can arrange for you to see a catalog of the items, if you wish," Mamdouba said.

Mamdouba played to Chapman now, smiling a bit too broadly. "I imagine by the time you're through with this investigation, you'll be asking me to sign you up for one of our safaris, Detective."

"Don't count on it. I'm a Discovery channel guy. The only safari you'll get me on is in my Naugahyde chair in front of the television set. No mosquitoes, no wild boars, no hungry cannibals. Just tell me if you've got any vaults down here, okay, sir?"

I was ready to break up the group and take them down the hall, one at a time, to an empty lab that had been set aside for us. Mike wanted to ask each of them whether they had known Pablo Bermudez, the worker who fell off the Met roof, and I had scores of questions about their contact with Katrina.

"Any of you done any foreign travel this year?" Mike asked.

Each one of them nodded. He threw out a random sampling of foreign cities, then got to London. Both Bellinger and Poste responded that they had been there.

"When did you go, and with whom?"

"Can't be sure of the date," said Erik Poste. "Late March, if I'm not mistaken. Alone. I'd been to an auction of great Masters in Geneva and stopped there on the way back. Did a bit of museum business at some galleries. Twenty-four-hour layover."

"And you?"

"January," Bellinger answered. "Pierre Thibodaux took me along. The British Museum was thinking of deaccessioning some medieval objects. He wanted my opinion. Spent an afternoon there with him looking them over."

"Just the two of you on the trip?"

"And Eve. Eve Drexler. Just along for the ride, as far as I could tell. A perk for being a loyal soldier."

I put down my coffee and stared across the table at Bellinger. "Museum security's pretty tight these days. Do you recall signing in and showing any identification to be admitted?"

Bellinger took a deep breath and closed his eyes. "Probably so. Sure, sure."

"Do you remember how Eve Drexler signed in?" He ran a finger around the rim of his mug. "I haven't the faintest idea. There was nothing particularly significant about--"

There was a knock on the door before Mark Zimmerly opened it and came in.

"Excuse me, Mr. Mamdouba, but I need to speak with you immediately."

Ever careful of his manners, the curator tried to calm the agitated young man. "In just a minute, Zimm. Step outside and I'll join you shortly."

Zimm hesitated before speaking, but looked to Chapman for help and decided not to wait. "You got a third-grade class from Scarsdale, sir. They're freaking out up there, the kids are screaming bloody murder."

Mamdouba stood up and moved briskly to the door, hoping to cut off the next sentence before any of the guests heard whatever the problem was.

"What is it, Zimm?" Mike asked. He beat the older man to the exit, ready to help.

"It's in a diorama, in one of the display cases on the main floor. It's--it's...an arm. A severed human arm."

26 The heavily tattooed upper arm of a large man was on the floor inside the glass case.