We Keep the Dead Close

by Becky Cooper

  I also learned that in January 1969, Stephen Williams had been in a powerful but impermanent position. He was only the acting director of the museum. Then, within three weeks of Jane’s murder, he was promoted to full director. Even though I’d heard from multiple people that Professor Williams was not a great scholar—former assistant professor Tom Patterson put a fine point on it: “A number of people have described him as the dumbest person in American archaeology”—for a few months after Jane’s death, Williams was suddenly both the head of the museum and the chairman of the department. The double appointment was nearly unprecedented in the history of Harvard’s Anthropology department.

  Aside from the devotion of his small cohort, Williams’s success in the department was, likely, the result of his ability to fundraise. He had a good track record: In November 1968, he had secured an anonymous million-dollar donation. But the university was in the middle of its $48.7 million fundraising drive. If Williams wanted the permanent position as director, it was probably crucial to show administrators that he could help them meet that goal. The pressure to keep any scandals at bay must have been enormous.

  A disturbing line of thinking occurred to me. If Karl hadn’t had tenure at the time of Jane’s death, was it possible that he had silenced her to protect his tenure bid? And since the department may have been particularly incentivized to keep unfavorable stories buried during the fundraising drive, had Stephen helped shield Karl in order to spare the department the embarrassment and to safeguard his own promotion?

  This was purely an exercise in speculation, and I hardly had the raw material to prove anything. Only Jane’s brother, Boyd, had mentioned any antagonism between Jane and Karl. That was barely enough to build a theory on, never mind a case. But I had to admit that at least in the archive, the fates of Stephen Williams and Karl Lamberg-Karlovsky seemed intertwined. When Steve stepped down as the department’s chairman that summer, he wrote to Karl to reassure him: “Having gained your professorship during my term of office, there was nothing important left to do.” It felt like the archives were begging me to pay attention.

  For months after that trip to Cambridge, though, my progress on the book stalled. I took a full-time job at The New Yorker and my days were suddenly busy organizing my boss’s schedule, helping with early edits, researching story ideas, and picking up the occasional coffee. I could only work on Jane’s story around the edges of my job. But I never second-guessed the trade-off. It felt like I had been plucked from the faceless mass of every barista in Brooklyn who dreamed of becoming a writer. Plus, at the magazine I finally had resources and support for my investigation. I learned how to use Nexis, an online database of public records, to find contact information; how to organize mountains of research and tapes; how to file public records requests; and how to appeal when those requests were inevitably denied. Of all the agencies I queried, the Cambridge Police was the only one to acknowledge that it once had files related to Jane Britton. But, they said, the material may have been lost in a flood. (A source later laughed at me when he heard I had been trying to pry files from Boston authorities: Good luck doing that if your name isn’t O’Sullivan.)

  My work on Jane’s story was limited to what I could do remotely—emails, phone calls on mornings and weekends, and lots of reading—and on vacation time. I used my first days off to head back up to Harvard to poke around the Peabody archives again. Professor Jeffrey Quilter, the then director of the Peabody Museum, heard about my sudden interest in the Anthropology department and asked to meet while I was in town. The request was exactly what I had feared: a signal that I finally had tripped a wire. We met in his office, and I tried to be as vague as possible without lying. I told Professor Quilter I was writing about systems of power and who gets to tell stories of their past. After listening for a while, he gave me a strange smile—an expression I later realized was slight disbelief of what he was about to say. “I’m just going to tell you because I like you,” he began. If I wanted to “stir up a hornet’s nest,” I should look into Jane Britton’s death. “The sense that this murder goes unsolved is a cry for justice to me.”

  But it wasn’t until late 2016 that I found myself in front of the blue door on CUNY Brooklyn’s campus. My boss had given me the afternoon off because he knew how big a deal this was. For the first time, I was about to meet a friend of Jane’s in person.

  The door opened, and Arthur Bankoff—Jane’s neighbor, confidant, and colleague on the 1968 Tepe Yahya season—stepped out to meet me.

  Arthur was shorter than I expected, dressed in khakis with a checked button-down shirt, a vest, and a yarmulke. The long tassels of his tzitzit dangled out of both of his pant pockets. He had lost much of his hair, but his warm, mischievous eyes made him appear much younger than his seventy-one years.

  On the phone to coordinate the meeting, he had told me that he suspected Karl as the murderer though he, like Boyd, dismissed the affair angle. There was an animosity between Karl and Jane, Arthur remembered. It started in Iran—Karl questioned her fieldwork and wasn’t hesitant about putting her down—and the tension was exacerbated when his wife arrived. But, Arthur reminded me, he had stayed abroad after Iran, and anything could have happened between Jane and Karl once they returned to Cambridge.

  I asked why Arthur suspected Karl all these years, then. “Because I hated him,” he said.

  Now Arthur welcomed me in, and I looked around the office. It was dark and industrial, filled with three computer monitors, a giant metal standing fan, and books about Eastern European archaeology and metallurgy. His Harvard diploma hung on the wall.

  Around the perimeter of the room was a slim bit of molding he used as a shelf to prop up some framed pictures—of his children, of his expeditions in Eastern Europe, and of the 1968 dig in Iran. It was the picture of everyone in front of the Land Rover that I had studied years ago. His was nearly poster-size. He said he’d hung it, despite his hatred of Karl, because it had Jim and Jane in it. “In with all the kind of painful memories, it also brought back very good memories.”

  We walked up to it, and he asked if I could pick out everyone. “Andrea. Karl. Martha. James,” I said. “Jim,” he corrected, and added: “It’s funny, I just spoke to him this morning.”

  Arthur said he’d called to ask if it was okay to speak with me. It was the first time he had mentioned Jane to Jim in nearly fifty years. “You just don’t talk about certain things. You sit and grunt at each other like you’re in a club.” To Arthur’s surprise, Jim had said it was fine, and then went on to mention that he had been reading something in the Harvard alumni magazine about police having caught a serial criminal who had flown under the radar for years. “Maybe he’s the one who was responsible for this,” Jim had said. Arthur doubted it but added that he was here to talk if Jim wanted. Jim didn’t bite. “We went on to discuss our health like old people all do.” Still, the story was enough to give me hope that I might one day speak to Jim.

  I edged closer to the expedition photo. As I did, I was startled by how different Jane’s face was in his print than in the smaller version I had studied. In the monograph, Jane’s pose had always seemed rebellious and her expression—eyes looking down and big grin—had made her seem almost cocky, as if she knew the performance she was putting on and was very pleased with herself. But in Arthur’s photo—taken, I realized, just a fraction of a moment before or after the other—her expression was radically different. Her grin was more of an indecipherable line, and instead of looking away from the group as it originally seemed, Jane was staring upward, at the camera, and into me. There was a vulnerability in her gaze; beseeching, almost. No one else’s face had changed like Jane’s. But the difference was startling. Jane’s eyes felt like they were tracking me.

  Jane close-up from the Tepe Yahya monograph photo. (Crop of Fig F.6 on page XXXI, from D. T. Potts, Excavations at Tepe Yahya, Iran, 1967–1975: The Third Millennium, American School of Prehistoric Research, Bulletin 45. Copyright 2001 by the President and Fel
lows of Harvard College, courtesy of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, by permission from Richard Meadow.)

  Jane in Arthur Bankoff’s print.

  Tepe Yahya

  THERE’S A SPECIAL KIND OF insanity that descends on a dig. Out in the middle of nowhere, when the only people who speak your language are the same seven people you see every day. When the afternoon is violently hot and at night you shiver with the cold and dysentery. When there isn’t enough food and you can’t trust the water, and when gin becomes a coveted reward for good behavior. When what you dig is based purely on the luck of what trench you’re assigned, but you’re judged on what you’re pulling up. When you’re covered in dust and you have to shower in the cast-off stream filled with camel dung, and you try to sleep despite the fear that those camels will step on your head, and you can’t because you learn very early that it’s a lie that roosters only crow at dawn. Tensions develop. Hatred develops. And yet, hungry for English, hungry for interaction, you have no choice but to turn to those same seven people.

  Jane once wrote about the simmering explosiveness on digs: “Small-group situation tends to create downright psychotic atmosphere. i.e., it’s okay for me, I’m used to it, but wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.”

  At least this one had started off well.

  In mid-June, the crew had arrived in Tehran. It was the final decade before the Iranian Revolution; the shah was still in power, and alcohol still flowed freely. The crew, in fact, had almost exactly traded places with Iran’s leader, who had been at Harvard that week, giving one of the graduation speeches and getting an honorary degree. (The other speaker that year was Coretta Scott King, who accepted the invitation in her late husband’s place.)

  The crew had spent a few days at the British Institute of Persian Studies, which doubled as a plush hotel of sorts, run by David Stronach and Sir Max Mallowan, the archaeologist and husband of Agatha Christie. They whiled away the week picking up odds and ends they would need for the expedition—food from the US embassy commissary, pickaxes, and plastic bags—and waited for Karl to get the final permit for excavation from the government’s antiquities representative.

  The crew spent the sultry afternoons cooling off poolside or wandering through the bazaar. Jane loved the bazaar itself but hated the crowds. Strangers used the congestion as an excuse to get too close to her. A few pinched her butt. And the traffic in Tehran in general made Jane swear she would never complain about the cars in Rome again—little orange taxis zoomed around, making U-turns and backing up in the middle of the street. But it was good to be back with Jim. Jane found herself catching the odd angle of light on his face and feeling the bottom drop out of her.

  On their way to Iran, they had spent a few days together in London, and it was there that Jim had told Jane that he loved her for the first time. He left for Tehran slightly before her, and Jane found she couldn’t concentrate on anything in his absence. She went to the opera by herself but kept wanting to turn around to tell him something or to hold his hand before remembering that he wasn’t there. She had almost missed her flight to Iran because she couldn’t sleep, too consumed by the overwhelming desire to go out and chalk every sidewalk in London with their initials and a giant heart.

  She wrote in a letter to him: “There is something different about your chemistry that brings me a great deal of peace, as opposed to the rampant unease I usually have.”

  But the lack of privacy that awaited the couple in Tehran was getting to Jane. She and Jim didn’t want the others on the crew to know they were together, and they attracted too much attention in town—Jim because of how tall he was, and Jane clearly American in her round sunglasses. They spent the whole day waiting for the moment when even the late-hour talkers went to sleep and they could be alone, finally, over a gin and tonic. Otherwise, it was just a peck on the cheek after breakfast if they could find a quiet corner. Jim kept trying to make elaborate plans for them to find a time and place to sleep together for the first time, but the planning made Jane self-conscious. She wished he would just be brave enough to sneak down to her room in the middle of the night and longed for when they’d be peacefully settled in the desert.

  The crew set off for Yahya in two separate cars, with Jim and Jane and the Persian antiquities representative in the Land Rover, named Bucephalus after Alexander the Great’s horse. When the car stalled ten miles into their drive the first day, they fixed the engine with masking tape and chewing gum. Jim and Jane sang dirty French songs and recited the poems of Robert W. Service, “the Bard of the Yukon,” while the antiquities man rode along, patiently. Jane felt more in love with Jim than ever.

  * * *

  By the time they arrived at Yahya, it was too late to properly see anything. She and Jim shared a tent, and they moved their cots outside where it was cooler, not realizing how dramatically the night stripped heat from the desert. They woke up freezing.

  It was hard to exaggerate the remoteness of Tepe Yahya, and how much more rugged it was than what Karl had prepared them for. Baghin, the tiny village where they slept, was a few minutes’ walk from the majestic seventy-five-hundred-year-old mound. It had no running water, and there was no electricity in the whole of the valley. Some of the local workers, nomadic sheep and goat herders when the expedition wasn’t in session, camped in tents close by. The mail came in—when it came in—with a man on his bicycle. Drinking water was carried in from over a mile away by a driver on a donkey.

  Jane had been used to her dig in France with Professor Movius, where she stayed in a little pension with a bidet in the bathroom. A gourmet restaurant could be found at the foot of the street. At Yahya, the latrines hadn’t even been dug yet, and there were so many “animalcules” in the drinking water that it wouldn’t have surprised Jane if she could suddenly start seeing them dance. And when Karl told workers where to dig the latrines, Jane complained that he hadn’t bothered checking which direction was downwind from camp.

  The same lack of concern for detail was on display again that night when Phil Kohl, an undergrad from Columbia, arrived unceremoniously on the back of the truck that belonged to the local chromite miners. Phil, twenty-one years old, had hitchhiked his way to the site by himself because Karl had apparently forgotten––or hadn’t taken seriously––his promise to wait for Phil in Kerman.

  Karl had warned the crew that he would be difficult to get along with in the field. As a first-time director of a full-scale dig—last year’s expedition was only a survey of the area—he was concerned about making a good impression on officials, on whom he felt the success of and continued access to Tepe Yahya depended. This anxiety about projecting the right image made Karl quick to injure and quick to anger, especially if his “no debate with the chief” policy was challenged. Being embarrassed in front of government representatives was a particular sore point. On the trip down to Tepe Yahya, Karl worried the Iranian government representative had misconstrued some laughter among the crew as being directed at the representative himself, and he volubly lectured Arthur and Andrea Bankoff on how to act in front of people who were their hosts.

  Digging started on day two, and the work was hard. People came back from the mound looking like they had stuck their faces in flour. The food didn’t help matters. Hussein, the cook, did the best with what he had, but the local goats were stringy no matter how long or well you cooked them. The latrine, when it was finally built, was so vile that the crew ended up just using the bushes and ditches. It was no wonder many got very sick very quickly.

  But at the beginning, the shared experience of the site’s challenges brought the crew closer together. Jane was even surprised by how much she liked Karl. She wasn’t attracted to him—she told Andrea “legs too short and has a droopy ass”—but he had a tendency to behave as if he were still at Dartmouth, which meant that he was fun, if a little immature.

  She also grew to admire the valley where the mound was located. Though poor and remote, it was beautiful. Near
the site was a sacred shrine, an immense gnarled cedar tree growing through a round stone wall. It was surrounded by an enclosure so narrow that a viewer could see nothing but skyward, which made the ancient tree even more majestic. It was said that the tree was where Zacharias, the father of Yahya––John the Baptist in Muslim tradition––was buried. The area was also crossed with a network of qanats, or water wells. Only children could fit in the slim passages, so maintenance and repair were handled by young boys lowered slowly into the qanats. The valley was often filled with the sound of their haunting voices rising up from the tunnel entrances.

  But for Jane, the best parts of the summer were Jim and the night sky. Jim “has been spectacular,” she wrote to her high school roommate on one of those blue airmail sheets. “He’s the first person in a long time that takes care of me.” Sick with dysentery at dawn one morning, Jane had come back from her tenth trip to the bushes. She lay on her cot shivering, trying not to wake Jim up, when he moved his bed next to hers. He piled all their blankets on top of her and held her until she stopped shivering and fell asleep. All this when he had to get up at 5:30 a.m. to start excavating and was as exhausted as everyone else.

  She and Jim slept together for the first time that summer. Still not wanting to flaunt their relationship, they had discreetly removed the bed railings from their cots and drew them together. One night she felt so full of love she had to get up in the middle of the night to write him a bad poem. She watched him sleep for a while before she drifted off. It felt like watching the stars.