Linda Fairstein: The Bone Vault

“I’m ready, Ms. Cooper.” He was standing in the doorway and had his own flashlight in hand. “Anna, let me take a look at those lists.”

I followed the two police officers into the hallway, anxious to make myself useful in the pursuit. “I think it’s more important that you come with me. She can study the papers. I’ve tracked them against each of your names-all three of you, plus Bellinger, Poste, Thibodaux, Drexler. I don’t know what else I should be looking for.”

Socarides scanned the papers, as though trying to match names with the faces of people present. The obvious collections that referenced aboriginal artifacts had been circled, as had many of the African and Pacific Islands groupings.

“You missed one,” he said, slapping the papers with his flashlight. “Goddamn it. You missed Willem. Let’s go there first.”

Socarides passed us and started jogging toward the huge staircase and up to the fifth floor. I stood frozen in place for a few seconds, certain I had cross-checked every name in my case folder.

I ran after him, taking the flat marble steps two at a time, pulling myself upward by the brass banister that gleamed against the murky gray walls and plastered ceiling.

He stopped at the top of the landing to get his bearings, and I reached his side. I remembered what Ruth Gerst had told us. Poste’s father, Willem, had been a great African explorer and adventurer. Erik was on expert on museum history, someone had said. He had grown up in museums. After his father’s death, he came to the States to live, with his mother.

“Where do we go? I’m sick that I didn’t make the right connection.”

He was stalking down the hallway as he talked. “Nobody thought to tell you his name and you obviously never thought to ask. A prosecutor should know better than that.”

“Poste? It’s Willem Poste,” I repeated, trying to keep up with his long strides.

“Willem Van der Poste, Ms. Cooper,” he said, passing the lists back to me. “Look under theV ‘s. Like many Boers who moved to America after the Second World War, Willem’s widow dropped that formal, aristocratic part of the surname. Too Teutonic. Too Germanic. Look at your papers again and you’ll see all the properties donated to the museum by Willem Van der Poste.”

Fifty million bones hidden beneath these rooftops and thousands of them had been collected by Erik Poste’s father. Dinosaur fossils, mammalian teeth, human skeletons.

Socarides was taking me down the endless corridor to find Van der Poste’s bone vault.

Cops were swarming in and around the fifth-floor offices and storage cabinets. Even with the overhead lights switched on, the hallway was all dark corners and angles, old wooden cabinets with broken drawer pulls filling the wide spaces between doors, and exhibits shrouded in plastic drop cloths covering every flat surface.

I could hear Mike’s voice a football field or two farther down the way, yelling orders to try to organize the crew that was racing about, testing and yanking doorknobs while waiting for security guards with passkeys to let them into every locked entryway.

Socarides turned a corner and charged off in a perpendicular direction. I shouted to Mike to follow us and kept running after my determined guide.

The passageway led deep into the museum’s interior. Our footsteps echoed in the immense space of our surroundings, while Mike trotted behind us, calling Clem’s name every few seconds. None of this area was accessible to the public. Cool, dark, and dry, it seemed as remote from the popular displays of the forty exhibition halls that enchanted busloads of schoolchildren as the tip of the Empire State Building appeared looking up at it from the sidewalk.

We stopped behind Socarides at the old-fashioned door of a small room. It was a solid panel of oak with a foot-wide glass window at eye level. Black lettering that once announced the occupant’s name had long ago been scraped off the pane. The handle wouldn’t give. I stepped back and Socarides smashed against the glass with his flashlight, reaching in to open the door.

Inside the dreary room, I found the switch and turned on the lights. Fish skeletons. Thousands of them. Stained with a pinkish dye now familiar to me, they emitted a supernatural glow as they rested upright in bottles filled with ethyl alcohol, from the floor of the room to the fourteen-foot ceiling.

Chapman and Socarides were ahead of me, moving farther along the seemingly abandoned hallway, shattering window after window to get inside cubicles and cabinets, eyeballing their contents, as they worked their way toward a dead end.

“Next one over. This stuff used to be up here, I know,” Socarides called to us. We ran back to the main hallway and down another lifeless wing of storage space.

Four more tries at small, dreary rooms yielded an incalculable number of drawers filled with the still bodies of birds. Feathers, beaks, bills, and tiny little vertebrae everywhere.

Mike slammed the last one behind him and stopped to take a deep breath.

“Here, Detective. Over here.”

I followed Mike a few yards farther down the corridor to the twelve-by-twelve-foot storeroom into which Socarides had hacked his way. Both of us stepped inside.

Human skeletons, six of them suspended full length, hung in a row facing the entrance door. Each of the macabre sextet was hooked at the base of his cracked skull by a shiny brass hinge that attached to the top shelf, several feet above our heads.

Long, bony fingers met me at eye level, dangling from the chalky remains of these forgotten souls. I half expected them to lift in unison and reach out to grasp some part of my neck or throat.

Behind them and on each of the walls of this secluded den were stacks and stacks of bones. I swiveled to my left to get out of Mike’s way as he ran his flashlight up and down the space beside the door, looking for light switches. Now I was facing three rows of skulls, human heads with protruding teeth, hollow cheeks, and black sockets that once held eyes which would have returned my stunned gaze dead-on.

“What’s here? What do you know about this?” Mike asked.

“It is Willem Van der Poste, Erik Poste’s father,” I said.

The beams of our three flashlights probing up and down the shelves made it even creepier. I directed the light to the far side of the room to find more skulls, these with hair still clinging to the decaying scalps.

“Some of these were his. The man amassed a huge collection of African artifacts. But he did it in the employ of dozens of different patrons. Great white hunter kind of thing.”

“This his private vault?”

“No, no. He never had the money for that.”

Leaving that door open, Socarides led us to the adjacent space, letting Mike break into it and scan for better light while he talked. “Rich trustees and museum aficionados back in the twenties and thirties made pilgrimages to the Dark Continent. Some for big game, some for the sheer excitement, some to plunder the ivory and gold and rubber.”

More bones. The rest of the bodies that must have connected, at one distant time, to the forlorn heads in the room we had just left. Bones in boxes, neatly labeled with a first name or a tribe designation or a simple question mark.

“Willem’s father was a Boer. Went to South Africa at the turn of the last century. Developed a reputation as the most spectacular shooter of the lot. Bagged half the beasts that made up the basis of the original museum collection here. The man to see, in Africa.”

Into a third room, stacked again with human remains. Mike stepped back into the hallway and cupped his hands, yelling for reinforcements, then asked, “Whose rooms are these?”