Linda Fairstein - The Bone Vault

“I remember the year I went off to college, I howled when I learned Mother had given a strand of her South Sea pearls to the Greek and Roman curator’s wife, along with a couple of Chanel gowns. It’s a different world now. Very high and mighty they are.”

“Why do you think Hiram Bellinger didn’t get along with Pierre? Style? The quiet scholar versus the showman at the helm?”

“Hiram’s just a crybaby. No matter how much money we poured into acquisitions for him and the Cloisters, he’s never been satisfied. He embarrassed Pierre terribly with that purchase of the tapestries that he claimed were from the Gobelins’ workshops. We gave him a fortune to complete the deal. He gets them here, to be restored at the textile laboratory at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and it turns out they had an entirely different provenance. Weren’t worth the price of the plane ride to America.”

I glanced down at my watch. Gerst’s gossip was interesting but hardly going anywhere.

She rested her glass on a side table and looked at Mike. “What I wanted to know is whether anybody told you about the vaults.”

“Vaults?” I looked at Mike and he shook his head from side to side.

“I should have figured. There aren’t many people around from the early days. It’s quite possible Pierre doesn’t even know about their existence.”

Mrs. Gerst lifted her glass to her lips and took several sips of the bourbon.

“This goes back almost fifty years, when there were some very lean times at the museum. There was a trustee named Arthur Paglin, who had a mediocre personal collection, but an awful lot of money. The director at the time was after him to make a donation that would enable a massive renovation of what was then called the Great Hall. The man knew how to drive a deal like the devil.”

“What did he do?”

“He agreed to donate the money. But he had two conditions. The first was that the Met sell to him most of their collection of Egyptian art-which they’d bought many years earlier-at the original prices.”

“Why do that?”

“So he could bequeath the objects back to the Met, and this time they would all bear the designation ‘Gifts of Arthur Paglin’ in perpetuity. He’d get the credit for having put together the collection, and a brilliant tax deduction as well. Worth far more than the cost of the art at the 1930s prices.”

“And the second condition?”

“He demanded a storeroom in the basement of the museum. A private vault. He wanted a storage space that only he and his personal curator could access. Rent-free.”

“And they gave it to him?”

“With great reluctance. Imagine, to other collectors, the value of having this perfectly secure vault right inside the Met, without having to pay for any of it.”

“Why did they go along with it?”

“Because the museum director wanted its contents eventually. Subsequent directors courted Paglin for the rest of his life, without even knowing what treasures were inside the room.”

“How’d they do?”

“Chacun à son goût,Detective. My husband used to say that the tax scheme had more value than anything Paglin had the taste to collect. There were some great pieces, but he’d been taken to the cleaners as often as the rest of us.”

“And this vault, this was common knowledge at the time?” I could neither remember reading about it nor hearing of it before today.

“Commonwould be the right word for it. Mr. Paglin and my father had similar taste in one regard: they shared a mistress. Just for a year or two, but long enough for her to see the splendors of the vault and tell my father about it. I don’t think many other people were aware of it. Starts that whole ‘mine is bigger than yours is’ thing. Men are such babies about that, don’t you find?”

“Do you know how many private vaults there are in the museum?”

“I have no idea. But Timothy Gaylord would be a good place to start. Anyone who’s involved in our Egyptian collection, even today, would know the Paglin story. I’d bet Timothy was working in the Egyptian department as a curatorial apprentice at the time of Paglin’s death. The old boy lived well into his nineties, like I’m hoping to do. Cheers!”

Mike turned to me. “Wonder if they have anything similar at Natural History. Private vaults, I mean.” We were both thinking, like Ruth Gerst, that a vault would be a great place to hide a sarcophagus.

“Not that I’ve ever heard.”

“How familiar are you withthat museum?”

“Herbert was on their board.”

“Herbert?”

“My late husband. Refused to have anything to do with the Met because my father was such a strong presence there. Loved the romance and excitement of exploration. Have you met Erik Poste yet? European paintings?”

“Only briefly.”

“His father, Willem, was one of the great adventurers of the last century. Right out of Hemingway, my dear girl. Fearless, handsome, sexy. Took Herbert to Africa with him on many of his trips. I think my Herbie was the only one, in those days, who had no stomach for the hunt, no desire to kill the magnificent beasts. Never got caught up in that.”

“What were your husband’s interests?”

“In Africa? Anything that wasn’t nailed down. After those early trips with Willem, my husband brought back every fossil he could find. Reptiles, tortoises, mammals. As long as someone else had done the shooting. The man just loved his bones. Believe me, if they’d had any private vaults in that museum, Herb would have finagled one for himself. Ask Erik Poste. He’d know. He lived with all those tales.”

“Well, where did they store the bones?”

“My boy, they’ve got an elephant room in the attic, a boar closet somewhere else, lizard vertebrae in herpetology. Do you know how many bones they’ve got in that place, scattered everywhere? Fifty million of them. Now what the hell for?”

“Well, what exactly did your husband want with them?”

“Same thing those others wanted: immortality. J. P. Morgan gets a hall of gems named after him, for giving the museum the Star of India. Gertrude Whitney gave birds-enough of them to give Hitchcock the creeps-and she’s got a hall of her own, too. Herbie? They never quite figured out what to do with all his bones. Couldn’t possibly display them in one place, because they cross over into too many departments. So they just sit there collecting dust.”

Gerst hoisted her glass again, drained it, and walked briskly to the bar for a refill. She turned to look at Mike as she spoke. “I met that girl once, you know. The dead one.”

“Katrina Grooten?”

“Yes. I’ve got a good mind for faces. They showed a photo of her, from the Cloisters, on the morning news. Sweet-looking young thing.”

“At the Met?”

“No, no. At the Louvre. There was a search committee made up of some trustees, when we invited Pierre to take the position with us. After he accepted, a few of us flew over to Paris, and they held a reception for him at the Louvre.”

She walked to her chair and steadied herself on one of its arms as she sat down. “I’ll have to ask him if it’s the same girl. I remember chatting with her about the small museum she apprenticed in, in Toulouse, I think.”

“Musée des Augustins?”

“That’s it. My husband and I had been there a few years earlier, so I was intrigued to hear about her scholarship. When did the Grooten girl come to work at the Cloisters?”

Around the same time-almost three years ago-that Pierre Thibodaux accepted the directorship of the Met. “I’m not sure.”

“Maybe he was mentoring her,” Gerst said.

“We’ll have to ask Ms. Drexler about that.”

“Eve? I call her ‘Evil.’ I wouldn’t ask her anything about another woman.” Mrs. Gerst had a rowdy twinkle in her eye and a quick smile. “She’d have put a knife in the girl’s back if Katrina had been getting too close to Pierre.”