The Book of the Dead (5 page)

“Yes, Dr. Collopy.”

She turned away and Collopy glanced at the group. “Now, I believe Beryl had the floor.”

The lawyer opened her mouth to speak, but Menzies held out a suppressing hand. “Mrs. Surd? Please wait a few minutes before contacting the Count of Cahors.”

Mrs. Surd hesitated, glancing at Collopy for confirmation. The director nodded his confirmation and she left, closing the door behind her.

“All right, Hugo, what’s this about?” Collopy asked.

“I’m trying to remember the details. The Tomb of Senef—it rings a bell. And, now that I recall, so does the Count of Cahors.”

“Can we move on here?” Collopy asked.

Menzies sat forward suddenly. “Frederick, this is moving on! Think back over your museum history. The Tomb of Senef was an Egyptian tomb on display in the museum from its original opening until, I believe, the Depression, when it was closed.”

“And?”

“If memory serves, it was a tomb stolen and disassembled by the French during the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt and later seized by the British. It was purchased by one of the museum’s benefactors and reassembled in the basement as one of the museum’s original exhibits. It must still be there.”

“And who is this Cahors?” Darling asked.

“Napoleon brought an army of naturalists and archaeologists with his army when he invaded Egypt. A Cahors led the archaeological contingent. I imagine this fellow is a descendant.”

Collopy frowned. “What does this have to do with anything?”

“Don’t you see? This is precisely what we’re looking for!”

“A dusty old tomb?”

“Exactly! We make a big announcement of the count’s gift, set an opening date with a gala party and all the trappings, and make a media event out of it.” Menzies looked inquiringly at Rocco.

“Yes,” Rocco said. “Yes, that could work. Egypt is always popular with the general public.”

“
Could
work? It
will
work. The beauty of it is that the tomb’s already installed. The Sacred Images exhibition has run its course, it’s time for something new. We could do this in two months—or less.”

“A lot depends on the condition of the tomb.”

“Nevertheless, it’s still in place and ready to go. It might only need to be swept out. Our storage rooms are full of Egyptian odds and ends that we could put in the tomb to round out the exhibition. The count is offering plenty of money for whatever restoration is necessary.”

“I don’t understand,” Darling said. “How could an entire exhibition be forgotten for seventy years?”

“For one thing, it would have been bricked up—that’s often what they did to old exhibits to preserve them. “ Menzies smiled a little sadly. “This museum simply has too many artifacts, and not enough money or curators to tend them. That’s why I’ve lobbied for years now to create a position for a museum historian. Who knows what other secrets sleep in the long-forgotten corners?”

A brief silence settled over the room, broken abruptly as Collopy brought his hand down on his desk. “Let’s do it.” He reached for the phone. “Mrs. Surd? Tell the count to release the money. We’re accepting his terms.”

N
ora Kelly stood in her laboratory, gazing at a large specimen table covered with fragments of ancient Anasazi pottery. The potsherds were of an unusual type that glowed almost golden in the bright lights, a sheen caused by countless mica particles in the original clay. She had collected the sherds during a summertime expedition to the Four Corners area of the Southwest, and now she had arranged them on a huge contour map of the Four Corners, each sherd in the precise geographical location where it had been found.

She stared at the glittering array, once again trying to make sense of it. This was the core of her major research project at the museum: tracing the diffusion of this rare micaceous pottery from its source in southern Utah as it was traded and retraded across the Southwest and beyond. The pottery had been developed by a religious kachina cult that had come up from Aztec Mexico, and Nora believed that—by tracing the spread of the pottery across the Southwest—she could thereby trace the spread of the kachina cult.

But there were so many sherds, and so many C-14 dates, that making all the variables work together was a thorny problem, and she had not even begun to solve it. She stared hard: the answer was there. She just had to find it.

She sighed and took a sip of coffee, glad she had her basement lab as a refuge from the storm raging outside the museum above. Yesterday it had been the anthrax scare, but today was worse—thanks in large part to her husband, Bill, who had a singular knack for stirring up trouble. He had broken the story in the
Times
this morning that the powder was, in fact, the museum’s stolen diamond collection, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, pulverized to dust by the thief. The news had caused an uproar worse than anything Nora could remember. The mayor, cornered by a bevy of television cameras outside his office, had already blasted the museum and called for the immediate removal of its director.

She forced her mind back to the problem of the potsherds. All the lines of diffusion led back to one place: the source of the rare clay at the base of the Kaiparowits plateau of Utah, where it had been mined and fired by the inhabitants of a large cliff dwelling hidden in the canyons. From there, it had been traded to places as far away as northern Mexico and western Texas. But how? And when? And by whom?

She got up and went to a cabinet, removing the last ziplock bag of potsherds. The lab was as quiet as a tomb, the only sound the faint hiss of the forced-air ducts. Beyond the laboratory itself lay large storage areas: ancient oak cabinets with rippled glass windows, filled with pots, arrowheads, axes, and other artifacts. A faint whiff of paradichlorobenzene wafted in from the Indian mummy storage room next door. She began laying the sherds out on the map, filling in its last blank corner, double-checking the accession number on each sherd as she placed it.

Suddenly she paused. She had heard the creaking-open of the laboratory door and the sound of a soft footfall on the dusty floor. Hadn’t she locked it? It was a silly habit, locking the door: but the museum’s vast and silent basement, with its dim corridors and its dark storage rooms filled with strange and dreadful artifacts, had always given her the creeps. And she could not forget what had happened to her friend Margo Green just a few weeks earlier in a darkened exhibition hall, two floors above where she stood now.

“Is someone there?” she called out.

A figure materialized from the dimness, first the outlines of a face, then a closely trimmed beard with silvery-white hair—and Nora relaxed. It was only Hugo Menzies, chairman of the Anthropology Department and her immediate boss. He was still a little pale from his recent bout with gallstones, his cheerful eyes rimmed in red.

“Hello, Nora,” said the curator, giving her a kindly smile. “May I?”

“Of course.”

Menzies perched himself on a stool. “It’s so lovely and quiet down here. Are you alone?”

“Yes. How are things up top?”

“The crowd outside is still growing.”

“I saw them when I came in.”

“It’s getting ugly. They’re jeering and hectoring the arriving staff and blocking traffic on Museum Drive. And I fear this is just the beginning. It’s one thing when the mayor and governor make pronouncements, but it appears the people of New York have also been aroused. God save us from the fury of the
vulgus mobile
.”

Nora shook her head. “I’m sorry that Bill was the cause—”

Menzies laid a gentle hand on her shoulder. “Bill was only the messenger. He did the museum a favor in exposing this ill-advised cover-up scheme before it could take hold. The truth would have come out eventually.”

“I can’t understand why someone would go to the trouble to steal the gems and then destroy them.”

Menzies shrugged. “Who knows what goes on in the mind of a deranged individual? It evinces, at the very least, an implacable hatred of the museum.”

“What had the museum ever done to him?”

“Only one person can answer that question. But I’m not here to speculate on the criminal’s mind. I’m here for a specific reason, and it has to do with what’s going on upstairs.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I’ve just come from a meeting in Dr. Collopy’s office. We made a decision, and it involves you.”

Nora waited, feeling a creeping sense of alarm.

“Are you familiar with the Tomb of Senef?”

“I’ve never heard of it.”

“Not surprising. Few museum employees have. It was one of the museum’s original exhibits, an Egyptian tomb from the Valley of the Kings that was reassembled in these basements. It was closed down and sealed off in the thirties and never reopened.”

“And?”

“What the museum needs right now is some positive news, something that will remind everyone that we’re still doing good things. A distraction, as it were. That distraction is going to be the Tomb of Senef. We’re going to reopen it, and I want you as point person for the project.”

“Me? But I put off my research for months to help mount the Sacred Images show!”

An ironic smile played over Menzies’s face. “That’s right, and that’s why I’m asking you to do this. I saw the work you did on Sacred Images. You’re the only one in the department who can pull this off.”

“In how long?”

“Collopy wants it fast-tracked. We’ve got six weeks.”

“You’ve got to be kidding!”

“We face a real emergency. Finances have been in a sorry state for a long time. And with this new spate of bad publicity, anything could happen.”

Nora fell silent.

“What set this in motion,” Menzies continued gently, “is that we just received ten million euros—thirteen million dollars—to fund this project. Money is no object. We’ll have the unanimous support of the museum, from the board of trustees to all the unions. The Tomb of Senef has remained sealed, so it should be in fairly good condition.”

“Please don’t ask me to do this. Give it to Ashton.”

“Ashton’s no good at controversy. I saw how you handled yourself with those protesters at the Sacred Images opening. Nora, the museum is in a fight for its life. I need you. The
museum
needs you.”

There was a silence. Nora glanced back over her potsherds with a horribly sinking heart. “I don’t know anything about Egyptology.”

“We’re bringing in a top Egyptologist as a temporary hire to work with you.”

Nora realized there was no escape. She heaved a huge sigh. “All right. I’ll do it.”

“Brava! That’s what I wanted to hear. Now then, we haven’t gotten very far with the idea yet, but the tomb hasn’t been on display in seventy years, so it will obviously need some sprucing up. It’s not enough these days to mount a static exhibition; you need multimedia. And of course, there will be a gala opening, something every New Yorker with social aspirations will have to get a ticket for.”

Nora shook her head. “All this in six weeks?”

“I was hoping you might have some ideas.”

“When do you need them?”

“Right now, I’m afraid. Dr. Collopy has scheduled a press conference in half an hour to announce about the show.”