Douglas Preston - Relic

He gripped her hand tighter.

= 19 =

The old freight elevator in Section 28 of the Museum always smelled like something had died in it, Smithback thought. He tried breathing through his mouth.

The elevator was huge, the size of a Manhattan studio, and the operator had decorated it with a table, chair, and pictures cut from the Museum’s nature magazine. The pictures focused on a single subject. There were giraffes rubbing necks, insects mating, a baboon displaying its rump, native women with pendulous breasts.

“You like my little art gallery?” the elevator man asked, with a leer. He was about sixty years old and wore an orange toupee.

“It’s nice to see someone so interested in natural history,” Smithback said sarcastically.

As he stepped out, the smell of rotting flesh hit him with redoubled force; it seemed to fill the air like a Maine fog. “How do you stand it?” he managed to gasp to the elevator man.

[122] “Stand what?” the man said, pausing as he rolled the hoistway doors shut.

A cheerful voice came ringing down the corridor. “Welcome!” An elderly man shouted over the sound of the forced-air ducts as he grasped Smithback’s hand. “Nothing but zebra cooking today. You miss the rhinoceros. But come in anyway, come in, please!” Smithback knew his thick accent was Austrian.

Jost Von Oster ran the osteological preparation area, the Museum Laboratory in which animal carcasses were reduced to bones. He was over eighty, but looked so pink, cheerful, and plump that most people thought he was much younger.

Von Oster had started at the Museum in the late twenties, preparing and mounting skeletons for display. His crowning achievement in those days had been a series of horse skeletons, mounted walking, trotting, and galloping. It was said that these skeletons had revolutionized the way animals were exhibited. Von Oster had then turned to creating the lifelike habitat groups popular in the forties, making sure every detail—down to the saliva on an animal’s mouth—looked perfectly real.

But the era of the habitat group had passed, and Von Oster had eventually been relegated to the Bug Room. Disdaining all offers of retirement, he cheerfully presided over the osteological lab, where animals—now mostly collected from zoos—were turned into clean white bones for study or mounting. However, his old skills as a master habitat sculptor were still intact, and he had been called in to work on a special shaman life-group for the Superstition exhibition. It was the painstaking preparation of this display group that Smithback wanted to include as one chapter in his book.

Following Von Oster’s gesture, Smithback stepped into the preparation area. He’d never seen this famous room before. “So glad you could come see my workshop,” Von Oster said. “Not many people down here [123] now, what with these dreadful killings. Very glad indeed!”

The workshop looked more like a bizarre industrial kitchen than anything else. Deep stainless-steel tanks lined one wall. On the ceiling near the tanks hung massive pulleys, chains, and grappling hooks for handling the larger carcasses. A drain was drilled into the center of the floor, a small broken bone caught in its grill. In a far corner of the workshop a stainless-steel gurney stood, bearing a large animal. If it hadn’t been for the large, hand-lettered sign taped to one leg of the gurney, Smithback wouldn’t have guessed that the creature had once been a Sargasso Sea Dugong; it was now almost fully decomposed. Around the corpse lay picks, pliers, tiny knives.

“Thanks for taking time to see me,” Smithback managed.

“Not at all!” Von Oster exploded. “I wish we could give tours, but you know this area is off limits to the tourists, the more is the pity. You should have been here for the rhinoceros. Gott , she was something!”

Walking briskly across the room, he showed Smithback the maceration tank containing the zebra carcass. Despite a hood drawing the vapors away, the smell was still strong. Von Oster lifted the lid and stood back like a proud cook.

“What you think of zat!”

Smithback looked at the soupy brown liquid filling the vat. Under the muddy surface lay the macerating zebra carcass, its flesh and soft tissues slowly liquefying.

“It’s a little ripe,” Smithback said weakly.

“What you mean, ripe? It just perfect! Under here we got the burner. It keep the water at an even ninety-five degrees. See, first we gut the carcass and drop it in the vat here. Then it rot and in two weeks we pull the plug and drain everything down the sink. What we got left is this big pile of greasy bones. So then we refill the vat [124] and add a little alum and boil those bones. You don’t want to boil them too long, they get soft.”

Von Oster paused again for air. “You know, just like when they cook the chicken too long. Phhhhtui! Bad! But those bones still greasy, so we wash them mit the benzene. That make them pure white.”

“Mr. Von Oster—” Smithback began. If he didn’t redirect this interview quickly, he would never get out. And he couldn’t stand the smell much longer. “I was wondering if you could tell me a little about the shaman group you worked on. I’m writing a book about Superstition . You remember our conversation?”

“ Ja, ja! Of course!” He charged over to a desk and pulled out some drawings. Smithback switched on his microcassette recorder.

“First, you paint the background on a double-curved surface, so you get no corners, see? You want the illusion of depth.”

Von Oster began describing the process, his voice pitched with excitement. This is going to be good , Smithback thought. The guy’s a writer’s dream .

Von Oster went on for a long time, stabbing the air, making sweeping gestures, taking deep breaths between his heavily accented sentences. When he was finished, he beamed at Smithback. “Now, you want to see the bugs?” he asked.

Smithback couldn’t resist. The bugs were famous. It was a process Von Oster himself had invented, but was now in use by all the large natural history museums in the country: the beetles would strip a small carcass of its flesh, leaving behind a cleaned, perfectly articulated skeleton.

The “safe” room that housed the beetles was hot and humid, and little larger than a closet. The beetles, called dermestids, came from Africa and lived in white porcelain tubs with slick sides, roofed with screens. The beetles slowly crawled over rows of dead, skinned animals.

[125] “What are those things?” Smithback asked, peering at the bug-covered carcasses inside the tubs.

“Bats!” said Von Oster. “Bats for Dr. Huysmans. It will take about ten days to clean up those bats.” He pronounced it “zose bets.”

Between the odors and the bugs, Smithback had had enough. He stood up and extended his hand toward the old scientist. “I gotta go. Thanks for the interview. And those bugs are really something.”

“You’re most welcome!” Von Oster responded. “Now, wait. Interview, you say. Who you writing this book for?” The idea had suddenly occurred to him that he’d been interviewed.

“For the Museum,” said Smithback. “Rickman’s in charge of it.”

“Rickman?” Von Oster’s eyes suddenly narrowed.

“Yes. Why?” Smithback asked.

“You working for Rickman?” Von Oster said.

“Not really. She’s just, well, interfering mostly,” Smithback said.

Von Oster broke into a pink grin. “ Ach , she poison, that one! Why you working for her?”

“That’s just the way it happened,” Smithback said, gratified at having found an ally. “You wouldn’t believe the kind of crap she’s put me through. Oh, God.”