Linda Fairstein - The Bone Vault

“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.”

Mike picked several sheaves of paper out of the large pile and handed them to Mercer and me while he continued to search for a more up-to-date floor plan. The directory I was holding appeared to be a comprehensive inventory of categories of collections. It was several hundred pages thick, bound together with a large metal clamp.

I peered over at Mercer’s folder, which was equally weighty. It listed names of donors, going back almost a century, and the specimens they had contributed to the museum.

“Is there anything that itemizes your collections by name and refers to the storage areas or display cases they’re in?”

“Everything that’s now on exhibit is computerized. You’ll find that printout here, too,” Mamdouba said, thumbing through the stack he had given to Mike.

“Like that only leaves us looking for the other ninety percent?”

“Well, we’re trying to get that all into the system, Miss Cooper. It’s a dreadfully difficult process. Two million butterflies, five million gall wasps, fifty million bones. Is that the kind of thing you’re interested in?”

“Fiftymillion? How many of them are human?”

“They’re mostly mammals, Detective. The numbers are in these folders that my assistant organized for you.”

“Settle us in somewhere. It’s gonna be a long night. And one of those magnetized passes-we’ll need to borrow one in case we go to the basement.”

Mamdouba was quiet for a few moments, undoubtedly trying to decide whether to engage in a battle with us. With obvious reluctance, he went into his desk drawer and handed Mike a plastic pass with a VIP guest label on it. He was thinking, it seemed to me, about what space he could stick us in temporarily that would cause the least interference or notice. “Come down the hall after me, please.”

He led us to an empty office about five doors away from his corner room. It was sparsely furnished, except for the shelves of mollusks that covered three walls from floor to ceiling. “If this is acceptable, I’ll check on you later.”

Limpets, snails, mussels, and oysters, all looking very gray in their pickled juice, watched over us as we set to work spreading out the floor plans on the empty desktop. “Start looking?” Mike asked.

Mercer sat on the window ledge, resting one of his long legs against an open desk drawer. “I’d concentrate on the level below the ground floor and the area up on five, above the offices,” he said, handing Mike a red felt-tipped pen. “They’ve got to be the least populated spaces when the museum is shut down. Look for unmarked rooms or closets and circle ‘em so we can take a peek.”

“And compare the different generations of maps,” I added. “See if something has been reconfigured and whether it’s accessible now or not.”

“Man, we’re gonna have to come back with comfy shoes. We got miles to cover in here.”

I made myself comfortable on the floor and looked up at Mercer. “You and I need to cross-reference what we find. Why don’t you start looking to see whether there are any familiar names from this case? Like is the Gerst collection mentioned, or anything about Erik Poste’s father? Maybe there are references to items on loan from the Met, like the mummies Timothy Gaylord was talking about.”

More than two hours went by and we were still drowning in paper. Mamdouba knocked on the door and pushed it ajar without saying a word.

“We keeping you?”

“On the contrary, Mr. Chapman. Just to let you know some of us will be here working late as well, in case that’s helpful to you.”

We had caught the attention of some of the staffers, and they were all probably too curious to leave when they stood the chance of seeing in which direction we might be moving.

He closed the door behind him and Mike spoke: “Damn. Looks like he’ll try to outlast us. This could change the evening’s plan.”

“I’ve been through this twice,” Mercer said. “Only name I recognize is Herbert Gerst.”

“A private vault?”

“This doesn’t show any such thing. Looks like he accounts for two of the elephants, a load of mammals-okapi, elands, and every other endangered species you can think of-and a whole bunch of crawling things that should be in little glass jars. But they’re spread out all over the museum.”

“And I’ve circled places where I think you could find arsenic,” I said, “starting with the taxidermy department. I suppose I should let Dr. Kestenbaum go through these lists, too. I have no idea where else to search for it.”

“Hey, it never occurred to any of us that the damn stuff was being used for so many different purposes in either museum. Somebody’s gonna have to account for all of it.”

My beeper went off and it was Harry Hinton’s number. I called him from the phone on the desk. “We’re on the way,” he said, “and Ryan’s still working on a court order for the computer interception. Maybe we’ll have it up and running for you by morning.”

“No luck for tonight?”

“Nah. Jumped on it too late.”

“Mercer will meet you at the corner of Columbus Avenue and Seventy-seventh Street in fifteen minutes. Tell Clem I’ll run interference inside.”

Mike kept poring over the interior layouts and contrasting the areas that we had accounted for as either open display space or rooms we had seen when Zimm had taken us through the place last week. Mercer and I took the elevator down to the ground floor. We showed our identification to the guard and told him Mercer was going out to meet another detective, but would return right away.

The man was slumped back in his chair, the brim of his cap pulled down on his forehead with his eyes glued to a science fiction magazine. The small black-and-white monitors on the stand beside him showed the entrances and exits within the network of courtyards behind us; twilight was descending, making it even more difficult to distinguish between the various gray walls of the abutting structures.