Linda Fairstein - The Bone Vault

I thought of making small talk to distract him, in case he might recognize Clem from her days of employment here, but he was as oblivious to me as he was to the television screens he was supposed to be viewing. I turned my back to him to be certain the long, highceilinged corridor was still empty. The poor lighting forced me to squint to see beyond midway, but the cavernous space would clearly make footsteps audible if anyone approached.

Minutes later, Mercer and Clem jogged toward the doorway. My square-badged companion, nose-deep in aliens and space pods, was grateful when I told him I’d swing open the door for my partners without needing his help. He waved me toward it and kept reading. Walking briskly on either side of our petite charge, Mercer and I led her around to the first elevator bank we came to and disappeared from view of the guard’s watch station.

When we reached the last leg of the walk back to our small room, I left Mercer and Clem at the entrance to the hallway. Passing the open door where Mike was at work, I continued on to Mamdouba’s corner turret. The door was closed, but I could hear voices inside. I gave the two of them a signal to come ahead to the mollusk room, then followed them in, locking the door behind me. The three of us rearranged ourselves in the cramped space to make room for Clem to sit. She had been glad for the short break, having showered and eaten a light dinner from the room service menu.

“Will this hold you guys?” She dumped out the contents of a small shopping bag. “Hope the city can afford the bill. It was all in the room, and I figured you might get hungry.”

I laughed as Mike grabbed the glass jar of pistachios and Mercer reached for a couple of candy bars. I opened the bag of M amp;M’s and washed them down with a few gulps from a can of soda that the three of us shared. We left the minibar bottles of scotch and vodka for the end of our night’s routine.

“That’s using your brain. I thought I’d have to eat bugs. C’mon,” Mike said, flattening the creased floor plans with which he’d been familiarizing himself, pointing to the basement areas surrounding the joint exhibition offices. “Make yourself useful. Can you give us any more specifics about what’s kept in these rooms?”

She talked us through some of the places where she had worked, guiding us with the capped tip of a pen. “It’s deceptive. See this? It’s a wall that separates two buildings. From the main floor it flows through like it’s connected, but from where you’re looking? You can’t get there from here.”

“Maybe we ought to go see these places,” I said. “It’ll give us a better sense of how we’ll have to maneuver and what to specify when I draft a warrant.”

“Let Mercer stay here with Clem, going over the rooms. Start figuring out where the bones are for us. You and I’ll check out this part of the basement. See if anyone’s still around.”

I heard the click of the lock as Mercer closed the door behind us. We paused for a minute, and listened to the shrill voice of a woman, coming from Mamdouba’s anteroom. I couldn’t recognize from its pitch whether it was Eve Drexler, Anna Friedrichs, or the curator’s assistant, who had stayed after hours.

Mike and I took the elevator to the lobby. The glass eyes of dozens of wild beasts, frozen in the safe confines of their dioramas, seemed to follow us down the vast corridor that led away from the museum’s southwest corner toward the basement entrance Zimm had used to lead us downstairs on earlier visits.

Clem was right. The place was eerie at night. Vast spaces followed after one another with every turn and change in direction, each one dimly lit at best. Elegantly detailed Art Deco light globes suspended from ceilings on brass chains had the look and effectiveness of another era.

Every thirty feet or so, a modern fluorescent fixture had been stuck in place, looking like something you’d see in a bus station rest room.

We descended down the dismal staircase to the section of the basement we had seen before. Zimm was still at his desk, working on the computer, three jars of repulsive arachnids at his side.

“Mamdouba said you might be down. Anything I can help with?”

I had my legal pad and pen ready to take notes. “Just back for some detail we missed. You alone down here?”

“Nope. Lights are still on. I think we’ve got a full house tonight.” He smiled at Mike and me. “You’re sure stirring up some excitement.”

We avoided the exhibition offices and headed to the far end of the hallway. Doorway after doorway, I sketched a record of whether the rooms were open or locked, what form of animal specimen seemed to be floating in the jars on the shelves, and what the climate conditions were.

Where had poor Katrina Grooten’s body been stored all these months? The possible options were overwhelming. I made a note to pin down Dr. Kestenbaum for a date to come back to take temperature controls to help determine the most likely surroundings for the creation of an “Incorruptible.”

For more than an hour we worked our way in and out of small storage rooms and smaller laboratories. Each time we reached a fork in the road, I’d take one side and Mike the other, agreeing to meet back at the intersection in fifteen minutes. We worked our way through three separate basement areas without any findings of significance.

By the time we got to the fourth subbasement, I was beginning to feel at home with the chemical odors, artificial lights, and countless numbers of dead things that filled every shelf, drawer, and closet.

“Your call, Coop,” Mike said, reading from a small sign on the wall in front of us after he pulled a hanging string to turn on an overhead bulb. “Wasps and winged things to the left. Dinosaur fossils to the right.”

“No bugs for me.”

“They’re not alive.”

“No bugs, period. I owe you, okay? There’s no choice here.”

I started down the narrow corridor to my right, trying the doors and finding several of them locked. The fifth knob gave easily, and I groped along the wall till I found the light switch.

This hallway had possibilities. Here was a room labeledBarosaurus Femurs, with leg bones larger than tree stumps. A quick scan suggested nothing small enough to be human, but I could not reach the higher shelves or see their contents. I marked it on my pad for a return visit.

Door after door yielded similar fossilized parts. Some rooms were all dinosaur heads, with hollow eye sockets four feet in diameter and horned nostrils that stood taller than my waist. Others had nothing but vertebrae lined up end to end. It would be hard to discern, without an expert guide, whether any other species remains had been mixed in with these antiquities.

I reached the end of the gray hallway and pushed against the last door, meeting with resistance as I did. It opened slowly, operating on a rusty old air pump hinged on the wall behind it. I leaned against the door to secure it in place while I studied the contents of the room. This one stored even smaller bones, and I walked to a rack against the far wall to study a tag that appeared to have some written description on it.

As I bent over to read it, hoping the bare bulb from the far end of the hallway would provide enough light for me, the door came loose from its anchored position. I heard a loud whooshing sound as it sprung away from the wall and slammed shut, leaving me alone in the confined space with a century’s accumulation of dust-covered animal skeletons.

I tried to tell myself that I was too tired to be upset. I talked to myself like a mother calming a six-year-old child. They’re just bones, I kept repeating, as I tried to get my bearings and make my way back to the door in the dark. There’s nothing in here to hurt me. I’m in a museum, the most child-friendly museum in the world, and my favorite policeman is fifty yards away.