Relic

by Douglas Preston

  There came a hiss of static over the intercom, and a voice said: “Mr. Pendergast to see you.”

  “Send him in,” said Wright. He looked sourly at the others. “This is it.”

  Pendergast appeared in the doorway, a newspaper tucked under one arm. He paused for a moment.

  “My, this is a charming tableau,” he said. “Dr. Wright, thank you for seeing me again. Dr. Cuthbert, always a pleasure. And you are Lavinia Rickman, ma’am, are you not?”

  “Yes,” Rickman replied, smiling primly.

  “Mr. Pendergast,” said Wright, with a small, formal smile. “Please take any seat you wish.”

  “Thank you, Doctor, but I prefer to stand.” Pendergast moved over to the massive fireplace and leaned against the mantle, arms folded.

  [220] “Have you come to make a report? No doubt you’ve asked for this meeting to inform us of an arrest.”

  “No,” said Pendergast. “I’m sorry, no arrests. Frankly, Dr. Wright, we’ve made very little progress. Despite what Ms. Rickman has been telling the newspapers.”

  He showed them the newspaper’s headline: ARREST NEAR IN “MUSEUM BEAST” MURDERS.

  There was a short silence. Pendergast folded the paper and carefully placed it on the mantelpiece.

  “What’s the problem?” asked Wright. “I don’t understand what’s taking so long.”

  “There are many problems, as you are no doubt aware,” said Pendergast. “But I’m not really here to brief you on the case. It’s enough if I remind you simply that a dangerous serial killer remains loose in the Museum. We have no reason to believe he has stopped killing. As far as we know, all his killings have been nocturnal. In other words, after 5 P.M. As the special agent in charge of this investigation, I’m regretfully informing you that the curfew we’ve set up must remain in force until such time as the killer is found. There will be no exceptions.”

  “The opening. … Rickman bleated.

  “The opening will have to be postponed. It may be for a week, it may be for a month. I can’t make any promises, I’m afraid. I’m very sorry.”

  Wright stood up, his face livid. “You said the opening could go on as scheduled provided there were no more killings. That was our agreement.”

  “I made no agreement with you, Doctor,” Pendergast said mildly. “I’m afraid we are no closer to catching the murderer than we were at the beginning of the week.” He gestured toward the newspaper on the mantle. “Headlines like these make people complacent, incautious. The opening would probably be very well attended. Thousands of people, in the Museum after dark ...” He shook his head. “I have no other choice.”

  [221] Wright stared at the agent in disbelief. “Because of your incompetence, you expect us to delay the opening, and do the Museum irreparable harm in the process? The answer is no.”

  Pendergast, unruffled, walked forward into the center of the room. “Forgive me, Dr. Wright, if I didn’t make myself clear. I’m not here to ask your permission; I’m merely notifying you of my decision.”

  “Right,” the Director answered, his voice shaking. “I see. You can’t do your own job, but you still want to tell me how to do mine. Do you have any idea what delaying the opening would do to our exhibition? Do you know what kind of message it would send to the public? Well, Pendergast, I’m not going to allow it.”

  Pendergast stared steadily at Wright. “Any unauthorized personnel found on the premises after five o’clock will be arrested and charged with trespassing at a scene of crime. This is a misdemeanor. Second violations will be charged with obstruction of justice, which is a felony, Dr. Wright. I trust I make myself sufficiently clear?”

  “The only thing that’s clear right now is your path to the door,” Wright said, his voice rising. “It’s unobstructed. Please take it.”

  Pendergast nodded. “Gentlemen. Ma’am.” Then he turned around and moved silently out of the room.

  Closing the door quietly, Pendergast stopped for a moment in the Director’s outer office. Then, staring at the door, he quoted,

  So I return rebuk’d to my content,

  And gain by ills thrice more than I have spent.

  Wright’s executive secretary stopped her gum chewing in mid-snap. “Howzat?” she inquired.

  “No, Shakespeare,” Pendergast replied, heading for the elevator.

  ¯

  [222] Inside, Wright fumbled at the telephone with shaking hands.

  “What the hell happens now?” exploded Cuthbert. “I’ll be damned if a bloody policeman’s going to boot us out of our own Museum.”

  “Cuthbert, be quiet,” said Wright. Then he spoke into the handset. “Get me Albany, right away.”

  There was a silence while he was put on hold. Wright looked over the receiver at Cuthbert and Rickman, controlling his heavy breathing with an effort. “Time to call in some favors,” he said. “We’ll see who has the final word here: some inbred albino from the Delta, or the Director of the largest natural history museum in the world.”

  = 32 =

  The vegetation here is very unusual. The cycads and ferns look almost primordial. Too bad there isn’t time for more careful study. We’ve used a particularly resilient variety as packing material for the crates; feel free to let Jörgensen take a look, if he’s interested.

  I fully expect to be with you at the Explorer’s Club a month from now, celebrating our success with a brace of dry martinis and a good Macanudo. Until then, I know I can entrust this material and my reputation to you.

  Your colleague,

  Whittlesey

  Smithback looked up from the letter. “We can’t stay here. Let’s go to my office.”

  His cubbyhole lay deep in a maze of overflow offices on the Museum’s ground level. The honeycomb [224] passages, full of noise and bustle, seemed a refreshing change to Margo after the damp, echoing basement corridors outside the Secure Area. They walked past a large green Dumpster overflowing with back issues of the Museum’s magazine. Outside Smithback’s office, a large bulletin board was plastered with a variety of irate letters from subscribers, for the amusement of the magazine staff.

  Once before, hot on the trail of an issue of Science long overdue from the periodical library, Margo had penetrated Smithback’s messy lair. It was as she remembered it: his desk a riot of photocopied articles, half-finished letters, Chinese take-out menus, and numerous books and journals the Museum’s libraries were no doubt very eager to find.

  “Have a seat,” Smithback said, pushing a two-foot stack of paper brusquely off a chair. He closed the door, then walked around his desk to an ancient bentwood rocker. Paper crackled beneath his feet.

  “Okay,” he said in a low tone. “Now, you’re sure the journal wasn’t there?”

  “I told you, the only crate I had a chance to look at was the one Whittlesey packed himself. But it wouldn’t have been in the others.”

  Smithback examined the letter again. “Who’s this Montague the thing’s addressed to?” he asked.

  “Don’t know,” Margo replied.

  “How about Jörgensen?”

  “Haven’t heard of him, either.”

  Smithback pulled down the Museum’s telephone listing from a shelf. “No Montague here,” he murmured, flipping pages. “Aha! Here’s Jörgensen. Botany. Says he’s retired. How come he still has an office?”

  “Not unusual in this place,” Margo replied. “Independently wealthy people with little else to fill up their time. Where’s his office?”

  “Section forty-one, fourth floor,” Smithback said, [225] closing the book and dropping it on his desk. “Near the herbarium.” He stood up. “Let’s go.”

  “Wait a minute, Smithback. It’s almost four o’clock. I should call Frock and let him know what ...”

  “Later,” Smithback said, making for the door. “Come on, Lotus Blossom. My journalist’s nose hasn’t picked up a decent scent all afternoon.”

  Jörgensen’s office was a small, windowless laboratory with a high ceiling. It
held none of the plants or floral specimens Margo expected to see in a botanist’s lab. In fact, the room was empty except for a large workbench, a chair, and a coat rack. A drawer of the workbench was open, exposing a variety of worn tools. Jörgensen was bending over the workbench, fiddling with a small motor.

  “Dr. Jörgensen?” Smithback asked.

  The old man turned and gazed at Smithback. He was almost completely bald, with bushy white eyebrows overhanging intense eyes the color of bleached denim. He was bony and stooped but Margo thought he must be at least six feet four.

  “Yes?” he said in a quiet voice.

  Before Margo could stop him, Smithback handed Jörgensen the letter.

  The man began reading, then started visibly. Without taking his eyes from the letter, he reached around for the battered chair and carefully eased himself into it.

  “Where did you get this?” he demanded when he had finished.

  Margo and Smithback looked at each other.

  “It’s genuine,” Smithback said.

  Jörgensen stared at them. Then he handed the letter back to Smithback. “I don’t know anything about this,” he said.

  There was a silence. “It came from the crate John Whittlesey sent back from the Amazon expedition seven years ago,” Smithback prompted hopefully.

  [226] Jörgensen continued to stare at them. After a few moments, he returned to his motor.

  The two watched him tinker for a moment. “I’m sorry we interrupted your work,” Margo said at last. “Perhaps this isn’t a good time.”

  “What work?” asked Jörgensen, without turning around.

  “Whatever that is you’re doing,” Margo replied.

  Jörgensen suddenly barked out a laugh. “This?” he said, turning to face them again. “This isn’t work. This is just a broken vacuum cleaner. Since my wife died, I’ve had to do the housework myself. Darn thing blew up on me the other day. I only brought it in here because this is where all my tools are. I don’t have much work to do anymore.”

  “About that letter, sir—” Margo pressed.

  Jörgensen shifted in the creaky chair and leaned back, looking at the ceiling. “I hadn’t known it existed. The double-arrow motif served as the Whittlesey family crest. And that’s Whittlesey’s handwriting, all right. It brings back memories.”

  “What kind?” asked Smithback eagerly.

  Jörgensen looked over at him, his brows contracting with irritation. “Nothing that’s any of your business,” he said tartly. “Or at least, I haven’t heard just why it might be your business.”

  Margo shot Smithback a shut-up look. “Dr. Jörgensen,” she began, “I’m a graduate student working with Dr. Frock. My colleague here is a journalist. Dr. Frock believes that the Whittlesey expedition, and the crates that were sent back, have a link to the Museum murders.”

  “A curse?” said Jörgensen, raising his eyebrows theatrically.

  “No, not a curse,” said Margo.

  “I’m glad you haven’t bought into that one. There’s no curse. Unless you define a curse as a mixture of [227] greed, human folly, and scientific jealousy. You don’t need Mbwun to explain ...”

  He stopped. “Why are you so interested?” he asked suspiciously.

  “To explain what?” Smithback interjected.

  Jörgensen looked at him with distaste. “Young man, if you open your mouth one more time I’m going to ask you to leave.”

  Smithback narrowed his eyes but remained silent. Margo wondered if she should go into detail about Frock’s theories, the claw marks, the damaged crate, but decided not to. “We’re interested because we feel that there’s a connection here that no one is paying attention to. Not the police, and not the Museum. You were mentioned in this letter. We hoped you might be able to tell us more about this expedition.”

  Jörgensen held out a gnarled hand. “May I see that again?”

  Reluctantly, Smithback complied.

  Jörgensen’s eyes passed over the letter again, hungrily, as if sucking in memories. “There was a time,” he murmured, “I would have been reluctant to talk about this. Maybe afraid would be a better word. Certain parties might have sought to fire me.” He shrugged. “But when you get as old as I am, you don’t have much to be afraid of. Except maybe being alone.”

  He nodded slowly to Margo, clutching the letter. “I would have been on that expedition, if it hadn’t been for Maxwell.”

  “Maxwell? Who’s he?” asked Smithback.

  Jörgensen shot him a look. “I’ve knocked down bigger journalists than you,” he snapped. “Now I said, be quiet. I’m talking to the lady.”

  He turned to Margo again.

  “Maxwell was one of the leaders of the expedition. Maxwell and Whittlesey. That was the first mistake, letting Maxwell muscle his way in, making the two of them [228] coleaders. They were at odds right from the beginning. Neither one had full control. Maxwell’s gain was my loss—he decided they didn’t have room for a botanist on the expedition, and that was it for me. But Whittlesey was even less happy about it than I. Having Maxwell along put his hidden agenda at risk.”

  “What was that?” Margo asked.

  “To find the Kothoga tribe. There were rumors of an undiscovered tribe living on a tepui, a vast tableland above the rain forest. Although the area had not been scientifically explored, the consensus was that the tribe was extinct, that only relics remained. Whittlesey didn’t believe this. He wanted to be their discoverer. The only problem was, the local government denied him a permit to study on the tepui. Said it was reserved for their own scientists. Yankee go home.”

  Jörgensen snorted, shook his head.

  “Well, what it was really being reserved for was depredation, land rape. Of course, the local government had heard the same rumors Whittlesey had. If there were Indians up there, the government didn’t want them in the way of timbering and mining. So anyway, the expedition had to approach from the north. A much less convenient route, but away from the restricted area. And they were forbidden to ascend the tepui itself.”

  “Did the Kothoga still exist?” Margo asked.

  Jörgensen slowly shook his head. “We’ll never know. The government found something on top of that tepui. Maybe gold, platinum, placer deposits. You can detect lots of things with satellites these days. Anyway, the tepui was fired from the air in the spring of ‘88.”

  “Fired?” Margo asked.

  “Burned clear with napalm,” Jörgensen said. “Unusual and expensive to do it that way. Apparently, the fire got out of hand, spread, burned uncontrollably for months. Then they built a big road in there, coming up the easy way from the south. They hauled in Japanese hydraulic mining equipment and literally washed away [229] huge sections of the mountain. No doubt they leeched the gold and platinum or whatever with cyanic compounds, then just let the poison run into the rivers. There’s nothing, I mean nothing, left. That’s why the Museum never sent a second expedition down to search for the remains of the first.” He cleared his throat.

  “That’s terrible,” breathed Margo.

  Jörgensen gazed up with his unsettling cerulean eyes. “Yes. It is terrible. Of course, you won’t read about it in the Superstition exhibition.”

  Smithback held up one hand while slipping out his microcassette recorder with the other. “Excuse me, may I—?”

  “No, you may not record this. This is not for attribution. Not for quotation. Not for anything. I’ve received a memo to that effect just this morning, as you probably know. This is for me: I haven’t been able to talk about this for years, and I’m going to do it now, just this once. So keep quiet and listen.”

  There was a silence.

  “Where was I?” Jörgensen resumed. “Oh, yes. So Whittlesey had no permit to ascend the tepui. And Maxwell was the consummate bureaucrat. He was determined to make Whittlesey play by the rules. Well, when you get out there in the jungle two hundred miles from any kind of government. ... What rules?” He cackled.

  “I doubt if a
nybody knows exactly what did happen out there. I got the story from Montague, and he pieced it together from Maxwell’s telegrams. Not exactly an unbiased source.”

  “Montague?” Smithback interrupted.

  “In any case,” Jörgensen continued, ignoring Smithback, “it appears Maxwell stumbled upon some unbelievable botany. Around the base of the tepui, ninety-nine percent of the plant species were absolutely new to science. They found strange, primitive ferns and monocotyledons that looked like throwbacks to the Mesozoic Era. Even though Maxwell was a physical [230] anthropologist, he went crazy over the strange vegetation. They filled up crate after crate with odd specimens. That was when Maxwell found those seed pods.”

  “How important were they?”

  “They were from a living fossil. Not unlike the discovery of the coelacanth in the 1930s: a species from an entire phylum they thought had become extinct in the Carboniferous. An entire phylum.”

  “Did these seed pods look like eggs?” asked Margo.

  “I couldn’t say. But Montague got a look at them, and he told me they were hard as hell. They’d need to be buried deep in the highly acidic soil of a rain forest in order to germinate. I imagine they’re still in those crates.”

  “Dr. Frock thought they were eggs.”

  “Frock should stick to paleontology. He’s a brilliant man, but erratic. At any rate, Maxwell and Whittlesey had a falling out. Not unexpected. Maxwell couldn’t care less about botany, but he knew a rarity when he saw one. He wanted to get back to the Museum with his seed pods. He learned that Whittlesey intended to scale the tepui and look for the Kothoga, and it alarmed him. He was afraid the crates would be seized at dockside and he wouldn’t get his precious pods out. They split up. Whittlesey went on deeper into the jungle, up the tepui, and was never seen again.

  “When Maxwell reached the coast with the rest of the expedition, he sent back a stream of telegrams to the Museum, lambasting Whittlesey and telling his side of the story. Then he and the rest were killed in that plane crash. Luckily, arrangements had been made to ship the crates separately, or maybe it wasn’t so lucky. Took the Museum a year to untangle the red tape, get the crates back to New York. Nobody seemed in a big hurry to do it.” He rolled his eyes in disgust.