The Bone Vault - Linda Fairstein (41 page)

"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."

36

Mike, Mercer, and I were huddled in the corner outside Zimm's office.

"I've got the subpoena to hand to Mamdouba for the floor plan and list of rooms. The museum closes at five forty-five. That's half an hour. Clem's already telling people that she may get to town tonight. Why don't we have Hinton drive her up here and bring her into the place when there's no one around to see her. Then--"

"We'd still have to get her past a security guard."

"Like any one of them is going to have a clue?" Mike smirked. "The place will be emptying out for the night. Mercer, you can meet her outside the entrance. The guard'll be so busy dealing with Mercer and looking at his shiny gold badge that he won't even notice Clem. We need an insider to get us around here. Zimm's good, but he has no idea what we'd be looking for, necessarily. Clem would recognize the significance of anything she and Katrina discussed. She's snooped everywhere, I'm sure." "You think Mamdouba will let us stay late, after closing hours?" Mercer asked.

"Other people are in here doing their work."

"You trust him? You ready to take him into our confidence about having Clem here?" Mike asked.

I responded by looking at each of them. "What do you guys think?"

Mike wasn't ready to trust anyone. "Let's get her here first. One of us will sniff around the attic with Coop, looking at bones. The other one will hold hands with an Eskimo in a quiet room till the coast is clear and she can show us what she knows."

I called Laura's number and asked her to put Clem on. "You just missed them. You can reach them on Detective Hinton's cell phone. He was on his way to the hotel with Clem. She was getting tired."

I wrote down the number she gave me. "Any messages?"

"Call Nina at home tonight. It's pretty important." That would be the UniQuest funding story. "Sarah wants to talk to you later if you've got some time. Eve Drexler called. I recognized her name from the case so I asked whether I could help." "What'd she want?"

"To see whether I could give her a telephone number to reach Clem."

"What'd you tell her?"

"You taught me well. Told her I didn't know who that was and that I'd be happy to ask you. She told me not to bother you with it."

Eve was getting impatient with the e-mails. She wanted to talk to Clem. Or was she calling on Thibodaux's behalf? She was obviously spreading the news that Clem had planted with her about Katrina and the police investigation.

I dialed Harry Hinton's cell phone number. "Where are you?"

"Stuck behind a four-car pileup on the FDR Drive, just below Fourteenth Street."

"Think you can get Clem to the hotel, get her something to eat, let her put her feet up for half an hour, and get her to the Museum of Natural History by seven-thirty?"

I heard him ask if she was game and he got back on to assure me he could. "Well, we're down to only one guard to worry about," I told Mike and Mercer. "Traffic's bad and she wants a bit of a rest. No way they can make it before this place closes, so that will give us some time to get started. Let's find out which door they keep open so staff can come and go after hours. Harry'll call when they leave the hotel and one of you can walk Clem in."

Mamdouba was less than pleased to see us so near to closing time. His expression soured when I handed him the subpoena.

"Must I go to court?" he asked, reading the language on the small white document.

"No. You can see that the foreman of the grand jury modified the request. Instead of a personal appearance before them, you can satisfy your legal obligation by giving me everything we ask for. That's why my office called your assistant this morning, so you'd have the papers ready."

"Let me see what we've got for you." He left us in his colorfully decorated circular office and retreated to his assistant's desk. When he returned, he had an armload of papers.

The big grin returned to his face. "So, here you can begin." He unfolded a Xeroxed copy of a museum floor plan that stretched beyond the edges of his desk blotter. He ran his index finger from the Central Park West entrance door through the narrow lines that led into display rooms to the left of the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Hall as he talked.

"Now, what you see here no longer exists like this. It's become the Hall of Biodiversity, as you know. But you can use this--" "Wait a minute." Mike bent down and looked at the date below the name of the architectural firm that had done the plan. "This diagram was printed in 1963. You've torn up and rebuilt this place five times since then." He tapped the desk with his fist. "And we don't want the tourist version, Mr. Mamdouba. It's got to be current and it's got to be complete. I want details of everything that's below the ground floor and whatever is above the fourth floor."

"Mr. Chapman, there are seven hundred twenty-three rooms in this museum. You'll be here for a week."

"I gotta be somewhere for a week, and so far nobody's suggested Paris. Get me everything."

Mike pulled up a chair to the side of Mamdouba's desk and began to fan out all the wrinkled maps that diagrammed the mishmash of corridors and stairwells in the museum's twenty-three interconnected buildings.

"But, but you can't do that here," the curator sputtered at him.

"Because?"

"We've got to have a meeting. A bit of an emergency."

"With people from the Met, about the exhibition breaking up?" "Exactly."

"Is Mr. Thibodaux coming?"

"No, no. Not since he tendered his resignation. He's got nothing more to do with this. Some of the others from the Met are already here, and Miss Drexler is on her way with Pierre's files. I'll need this room, Mr. Chapman."

"Park us where you want us, Mr. Mamdouba. We're all yours."

"Tomorrow?"

"Right now. We got a lot of territory to cover and--"

"Yes, but I understand you're even bringing in help from overseas," he said quietly.

Mike met Mamdouba's supercilious smirk with one of his own. "I'm a patsy for reunions. Love it when the whole family gets together every now and then. We'll stay all night if we have to, sir. Is that a problem for you?"

"Of course it is. I have to keep the guards with you--"

"Likewe're the security risk? Those guys have been sleeping on the job for aeons. There's more life in your dead T. rex than in the whole passel of mopes somebody stuffed and left guarding your treasures. Tell you what, you can check my pockets when I leave, if that's your concern. Mercer and I are not much on collecting crabs in formaldehyde, and Coop here has more jewels than she needs. What we could use is a quiet place to look over these lists."