The Murder in the Museum of Man

by Alfred Alcorn

  “Yes, yes,” Drex was saying, bouncing on the balls of his feet. “Yes, Franz, tell Norman plans for —”

  But Frans or Franz or Frank was shaking his head. “Later,” he said.

  Drex had me once again in his grip. “And we number on you, Norman, when time arrives. I mean for presses. We do some leaking, for, how you say, for wetting hungers.”

  I was utterly at sea. I merely looked at them and asked, “Why?”

  “Why how?” said Drex.

  “This whole undertaking.”

  The man’s eyes narrowed and withdrew again as he seized and released my arm once more. But he was speechless. He turned to his assistant, who merely shrugged. “Think of it as an exercise in randomness. Or, as Beckett said, who cares who wrote it?”

  “But, but,” I stuttered, “it still matters what gets written.”

  “We’re not entirely sure of that anymore.”

  “Well,” I said, “I’m certainly at a loss for words.”

  “You have lost words?” Drex seemed alarmed.

  “More than words,” I replied. “To be perfectly frank.”

  “Perfectly Frank?” The Ruddy and Phyllis Stein Keeper of Great Apes scowled for a moment, then gave his awful laugh. “You are funny man, Norman, funny man.”

  And sitting here now, listening to the latest literary crowd yapping and howling in their compound below, I have to admit to a morbid fascination with the whole thing. I mean, if they ever do get a chimpanzee to bare his soul, what do they expect to find?

  More to the point, I wonder what all this might have to do with the murder of the dean. Old Fessing would have rolled his eyes at that circus and smelled a rat. I mean, where has Drex been getting the funds to finance his preposterous boondoggle? Was Fessing investigating that? Why do I feel suspicious just being in that place? If my suspicions were more acute, I might trust them more. But I have to remember I am still only an amateur in this business.

  THURSDAY, APRIL 30

  There has been a development that may or may not have a bearing on the Fessing case. I learned quite by happenstance today that Thad Pilty has agreed to allow the university’s Oversight Committee to hold hearings on the form and content of his proposed diorama of Paleolithic life. This is the first time I know of that this body, the University Oversight Committee on Sensitive Issues, to give it its full thwacking title, has been allowed to meddle in the affairs of the museum, where it has no warrant. I say “meddle” even though at least two of its members, Izzy Landes and Father O’Gould, are friends of mine. (They joined to give the committee some balance after it voted, at the insistence of the Science for the Masses group, to ban sociobiology from the list of approved words in the Wainscott Language Code.) And I would be less than honest if I did not admit to a certain conflict of feelings in that part of me wants the committee to come in and scuttle Thad Pilty’s little project, something, I am told, it is perfectly capable of doing.

  There’s another aspect of this oversight business that puzzles me exceedingly: Thad Pilty has long been a vociferous champion of the museum’s independence. While he holds his professorial appointment at Wainscott along with the rest of the faculty who are associates or curators at the museum, this has not kept him from supporting me in my sometimes lonely battle to preserve the integrity of the MOM. I know he objected at the highest levels to the appointment of Dean Fessing, knowing very well what that appointment would eventually entail. I know he shares my fear that if the university takes over, the exhibition space will get whittled down to nothing and he will no longer have a venue for the well-publicized exhibitions of his field research that he has mounted over the years. Surely he understands that to allow the Oversight Committee to review his diorama is to allow the university to get its heaviest foot in the door of the museum.

  It has made me reach for my detective cap (figuratively a deerstalker) and want to summon a hypothetical Dr. Watson with whom to share my darker speculations. For instance: If Thad Pilty is involved with the Fessing mess, might not the acceptance of the Oversight Committee’s purview be a ploy, a way of showing he has nothing to hide? Or does it show, au contraire, that he has nothing to hide and simply wants that fact established? No one, after all, other than the half-mad Chard, has enjoyed being a suspect in this case. Perhaps. What I can’t shake is the intuition that this oversight business fits into a larger picture of the whole grisly mess that flits and fades in the nether reaches of my consciousness.

  I should say that it is only reluctantly that I question Thad Pilty’s character. I have long admired his work, despite a good deal of muttering among his peers as to the significance he assigns his various finds. He is, of course, the Pilty who discovered and excavated the well-preserved remains and artifacts of Lucille and her family in a cave in the Dordogne. His subsequent book, Lucille: The Human Dimension, although I do not agree with its main premise, is a thoughtful, thought-provoking attempt to define what we mean when we say human. He expatiates at great length that it is not just tools but a panoply of tool-making tools, tool-using activities, and what he calls a “tool ethos,” constituting a paleotechnology that enabled early man to develop agricultural civilization. Izzy Landes pointed out the limits of this approach in the piece he did for The New York Review of Books. He sees Pilty’s hierarchy of values putting a premium on gadgetry. As Izzy remarked, “[Pilty’s thesis] might have us believe that the Hollywood hack, hunched over his ‘state-of-the-art’ word machine, is superior to the Bard scribbling away with quill and inkwell.” I couldn’t have said it better myself.

  I should say also that I like Thad Pilty personally. He is a large, squarish man with a sharp, eager face. He sports an Amish-style beard, bow ties, and well-cut tweeds, and remains one of the few people around here with tenure who still looks like a professor. (The younger generation, I’ve noticed, affect leather jackets and Bertolt Brecht haircuts while cultivating curt, vile manners.) Pilty in short is a gentleman and a scholar, and he plays a spirited if somewhat distracted game of doubles.

  But then, Professor Pilty is ambitious. He wants, I believe, to embody his ideas in this diorama, to erect, in short, a monument to his research. And to get his precious diorama, he appears willing to sell out the museum, if not his soul. Which is what makes me speculate.

  Putting a stop to the diorama is not something, unfortunately, I’m in a position to do myself. I have checked back through the Rules of Governance and the founding documents of the museum, and while it is nowhere stated explicitly that the ground floor of the atrium should be reserved for temporary exhibitions, tradition and precedent surely have established that to be the accepted practice. But tradition isn’t what it used to be. Thad Pilty’s project involves nothing less than the usurpation of common space by the Hominid Collections. Quite frankly, were the Director and the Board of Governors operating as they have in the past, i.e., responsive to my occasional and, I like to think, pertinent memoranda, this never would have happened.

  I have tried, through indirect means, to alert the Council of Curators about what the diorama will mean to opportunities for them to mount exhibitions in their own specialties. But except for Baldwin Jones, who, as a curatorial assistant, takes care of the African Collections, no one has heeded my warnings. And Baldwin’s acknowledgment sounded more like his usual politeness than any voicing of real concern. The curators, of course, want to cultivate their own little gardens, restoring, preserving, labeling, and researching the artifacts of their specialties. I can understand, sympathize with, and even envy them their narrow passions. I would no doubt be the same. But the very magic that enchants them is something that should be shared with the world. That is why museums are places for the public to visit. That is why, ultimately, the curators are curating what they curate.

  Of course, the moment the diorama is installed they will start complaining bitterly that they no longer have space for the special exhibitions they are so reluctant to mount in the first place. And when the time comes for the Curat
orial Ball, they will all be wondering aloud why it has to be held in some drab rented hall with no Herman to play Santa Claus. It’s not the same, they will say, as they lift their champagne glasses and grouse to one another about the lack of planning and administration at the museum. And they will be right.

  Be that as it may, Malachy Morin must also share some of the blame for allowing the Oversight Committee into the museum. It is another instance when he should have stepped in on behalf of the MOM, but I think he sees little or no difference between the MOM and Wainscott. I have heard, in fact, that he is bent on becoming a university vice president. (I must say I took some low pleasure in the look on his face after Lieutenant Tracy got finished with him last week.)

  But then, I do not pretend to understand Mr. Morin in the least. Yesterday when I was in his office, having been summoned there on one pretext or another, he began to regale a friend of his from Wainscott Administration with a story about the Queen of England being on the BBC radio show Twenty Questions. I remember listening to it myself, years ago, on the wireless I had in my digs at Jesus. As everyone knows, the audience on this program is given the answer to the question, which in this case, according to Mr. Morin, was “blackcock.” The contestant, of course, has twenty questions to ask of a panel of three judges in order to ascertain the answer. All of this Mr. Morin explained to his friend and to me, as I was standing there, with a hilarity I could not in the least fathom. According to his account of the broadcast, the first question the Queen put to the panel was “Can you eat it?” Now that struck me as a perfectly reasonable question, but it was one which had Mr. Morin and his friend, through a kind of contagion, nearly inarticulate with laughter. So much so that the former, his whole bulk quivering and shaking, could scarcely tell the rest of the story, in which the three judges, after a brief conference, answered yes. Her Majesty quickly asked, “Is it blackcock?” getting the answer with only two questions.

  I told them both that I failed to see the humor. In fact, I said, the Queen has no doubt had numerous opportunities to eat blackcock as the bird is surely found at Balmoral, where the royal family goes to shoot. And blackcock is, I added, a considerable if somewhat gamy delicacy. I informed them that it’s also quite a stunning bird, and there is a marvelous Audubon painting of a covey, which hangs, the painting that is, I believe, in a Harvard library. Well, by then they were both nearly weeping with a laughter of the silly schoolboy kind. I finally left them to their foolishness. What I simply cannot understand these days is why everyone thinks the Royal Family is such a joke.

  FRIDAY, MAY 1

  Suspicion, I’ve decided, is something like temptation: One naturally inclines to give in to it. It is not an entirely enjoyable state because ordinary decency forfends one from enjoying the perverse excitement of nearly but not quite knowing that someone, especially someone one knows, has done something very, very wrong.

  It began earlier this evening when I joined the Landeses for a drink at their table after dinner. I had been describing my visit to the Primate Pavilion over a postprandial concoction that Kevin, the Club’s excellent barkeep, has been trying out. (Gorillas in the Mist I think he called it — a mixture involving coffee liqueur rising from the chartreuse depths of a chilled glass. Sounds like a hangover, the good Lotte remarked, and kept to her brandy.) Well, when I recounted my encounter with the chimp masters and what they were attempting, Izzy could not decide whether to be appalled or amused and succeeded in being both, his eyes starting, his face opening with incredulous laughter. Chimp-lit, he called it, saying it was about the silliest thing he had ever heard about and wondered aloud if it was just age that made him think the world had gone bonkers. Lotte simply shook her head and smiled wisely.

  I told them with a lowered voice that I had visited the pavilion to see if there were any indications that Drex and his minions might be involved in what happened to Cranston Fessing. In a cursory way we touched on what the consolidation process might mean to the pavilion and how, in this instance, the killing of the messenger might have been a message in itself. It was then that Izzy made a remark that left the hairs on the nape of my neck standing. “If I were investigating this thing,” he said matter-of-factly, “the first person I would make inquiries about would be Raul Brauer.”

  “Raul Brauer,” I said, “the expert on early Polynesia?” A sick excitement began within me. “I thought he had retired, had moved out there.”

  Lotte snorted. “That old goat.”

  Izzy held his drink up to the light, sipped and nodded, and said, “He still gets back here. He has a house of sorts out beyond the bypass.”

  “Really,” I said, keeping my voice low, “you don’t believe all that stuff about that … cult?”

  Lotte smiled, and Izzy regarded me over his half-moon spectacles with a skeptical, knowing gaze. “That, Norman, is the conventional wisdom, based on the dubious assumption that some things are too grotesque to be true. I’ve always thought there was more to the Brauer cult than fantastical rumors.”

  I sipped my drink again and found in its clashing taste something that appealed to me. I glanced around at the genteel furnishings of the Club — the glassy chandeliers hanging from the corbel-edged ceiling, the glinting brass sconces on the fleur-de-lis wallpaper between the oil portraits of distinguished, long-gone personages, the layerings of linen on tables, on side tables, and on the arms of waiters, the well-groomed men and women talking and dining, and the heavy drapes swagged back to show it all richly reflected in the windows, as though part of the darkness beyond. It is one thing to entertain theoretical doubts about colleagues, it is quite another to have the force of real suspicion fall on one like a hammer blow. I shook my head. “No, Izzy, not in academia.”

  He merely smiled at me and murmured, “You have the gift of innocence, Norman.”

  I have had to return to the office to pick up my house keys, and as I sit here in the quiet (Mort just checked in to see if everything was all right), I have been brooding about Raul Brauer. Come to think of it, I have seen him around lately. He’s unmistakable, being a tall, heavyset man with a massive, voluptuously bald head and the pale, staring eyes of a predator. I never got to know him beyond the conventional pleasantries, and though getting long in the tooth now, he still moves with the aggressive, forward-leaning stride of a younger man. His museum office was directly under mine when he was curator of the Oceanic Collections. Back in the late sixties and early seventies, he achieved some small fame as a proponent of what he called “re-creational” experimentation in anthropological research. The role of the anthropologist, he contended, involves more than just digging up objects and analyzing the past; he must try as well to comprehend it in all its living aspects through a vigorous re-creation of life patterns, including rituals, food, tools, and art forms.

  He is an authority on the life and rituals of the Rangu, a tribe occupying the beautiful island of Loa Hoa in the Marquesas group. The area figures prominently in the founding of the museum and was the locus of the Schortle Expedition in 1892, the museum’s first serious collecting/research venture. Schortle returned with vivid accounts of the loose amorous arrangements among the Rangu, their predilection for sporadic warfare with neighboring tribes, their taste for what they called long pig, and the ease with which they cultivated breadfruit (whatever they are). I remember vaguely a National Geographic article devoted to Brauer’s work at a site far up one of the deeply clefted valleys that divide the island. There was a picture of him in a loincloth, his torso heavily tattooed, as he instructed several graduate students in some native custom with the help of a local chief. In some quarters he was dismissed as a charlatan. But that could have been academic pique at the amount of publicity he was garnering for his work and for himself. He used his so-called methodology, it was said, to recruit his graduate students, including several young females, for participation in a dance that included public copulation and culminated in a general free-for-all. More disturbing was the persistent rumor that, during
one of these expeditions, Brauer and his understudies got carried away with their methodology to the point where they sacrificed one of those hapless, unaffiliated types that show up out of nowhere and volunteer at digs. The rumor has it they not only sacrificed this young man but cut him up and ate him, according to the custom of the Rangu. There has been talk over the years of a Brauer cult, maintained by him and his students who were present at the alleged murder and cannibalism. They meet, supposedly, and do things that cults do. I have never subscribed to the rumor myself. It strikes me as apocryphal, one of those tasteless jokes that gets started around the campfire and takes on a life of its own. Besides, I can’t imagine academics letting something like that go by without someone, somewhere, publishing a paper on it.

  Now I have my doubts. Now I have my suspicions. But suspicions, however compelling, are not proof. I will need to do some digging, to go into the archives and go over the original files of those expeditions.

  Well, on other matters, quickly, before I take my yawning self home to bed. My e-mail has certainly been busy of late. I arrived this morning to find a note from Oliver Scrabbe announcing that he has established himself in the late dean’s office and will be meeting with each of us individually “to bring us up to date on the consolidation process.” It would seem that for him the takeover of the museum is a foregone conclusion. I was tempted to write him (I never use the e-mail, it seems so ephemeral) a response pointing out that a final decision had yet to be made but decided against it, at least for the moment.

  MONDAY, MAY 4

  I walked this morning through a bird-loud world enveloped in a veil of gauzy verdure of just-leafing trees prinked here and there with the pinks of the blossoming cherries and the unequivocal yellow of forsythia, which is common as blue jays and quite as beautiful. From the woodland path I saw on the shore of the pond a pair of Canada geese with a brood of tawny puffball goslings. Being a voyeur of nature, I stopped to admire them, the scene so affecting I could understand why a painter or a poet would want to grasp and hold it with the delicate, powerful grip of his art. These noble creatures mate for life. That way, we are told by naturalists, they don’t have to spend valuable time and energy on yearly courtship rituals. But is it not possible, I have often wondered, that they simply fall in love?