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 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, 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.
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 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 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 th
e 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 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 anybody 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 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.
“You mentioned somebody named Montague?” Margo asked quietly.
“Montague,” Jörgensen said, his eyes looking past Margo. “He was a young Ph.D. candidate at the Museum. Anthropology. Whittlesey’s protégé. Needless to say, that didn’t exactly put him in the Museum’s good graces after Maxwell’s telegrams arrived. None of us who’d been friendly with Whittlesey were ever really trusted after that.”
“What happened to Montague?”
Jörgensen hesitated. “I don’t know,” he replied finally. “He just disappeared one day. Never came back.”
“And the crates?” Margo pressed.
“Montague had been terribly anxious to see those crates, especially Whittlesey’s. But, as I said, he was out of favor, and had been taken off the project. In point of fact, there was no project anymore. The whole expedition had been such a disaster that the top brass just wanted to forget anything had happened. When the crates finally arrived, they sat, unopened. Most of the documentation and provenance had burned up in the crash. Supposedly, there was a journal of Whittlesey’s, but I never saw it. In any case, Montague complained and pleaded, and in the end they gave him the job of doing the initial curating. And then he just up and left.”
“What do you mean, left?” Smithback asked.
Jörgensen looked at him, as if deciding whether or not to answer the question. “He simply walked out of the Museum and never came back. I understand his apartment and all his clothes were abandoned. His family instituted a search and found nothing. But he was a rather strange character. Most people assumed he’d gone off to Nepal or Thailand to find himself.”
“But there were rumors,” Smithback said. It was a statement, not a question.
Jörgensen laughed. “Of course there were rumors! Aren’t there always? Rumors that he embezzled money, rumors that he ran off with a gangster’s wife, rumors that he’d been murdered and dumped in the East River. But he was such a nonentity in the Museum that most people forgot about him in a few weeks.”
“Rumors that the Museum Beast got him?” Smithback asked.
Jörgensen’s smile faded. “Not exactly. But it caused all the rumors of the curse to resurface. Now everyone, they said, who had come in contact with the crates had died. Some of the guards and cafeteria employees—you know those types—said Whittlesey had robbed a temple, that there was something in the crate, a relic with a terrible curse on it. They said the curse followed the relic all the way back to the Museum.”
“Didn’t you want to study the plants that Maxwell sent back?” Smithback asked. “I mean, you’re a botanist, aren’t you?”
“Young man, you know nothing of science. There is no such thing as a botanist per se. I have no interest in the paleobotany of angiosperms. That whole thing was way out of my field. My specialty is the coevolution of plants and viruses. Or was,” he said with a certain irony.
“But Whittlesey wanted you to take a look at the plants he sent back as packing material,” Smithback continued.
“I have no idea
why,” Jörgensen said. “This is the first I’ve heard of it. I never saw this letter before.” With a certain reluctance, he handed it back to Margo. “I’d say it’s a fake, except for the handwriting and the motif.”
There was a silence. “You haven’t said what you thought about Montague’s disappearance,” Margo said at last.
Jörgensen rubbed the bridge of his nose and looked at the floor. “It frightened me.”
“Why?”
There was a long silence. “I’m not sure,” he finally said. “Montague once had a financial emergency and had to borrow money from me. He was very conscientious and went through great difficulties paying it back. It didn’t seem in character for him to just disappear like that. The last time I saw him, he was about to do an inventory of the crates. He was very excited about it.” He looked up at Margo. “I’m not a superstitious man. I’m a scientist. Like I said, I don’t believe in curses and that sort of thing…” his voice trailed off.
“But—?” Smithback prodded.
The old man shot a glance at Smithback. “Very well,” he glowered. Then he leaned back in his chair and looked at the ceiling. “I told you that John Whittlesey was my friend,” he said. “Before he left, Whittlesey had collected all the stories he could find about the Kothoga tribe. Mostly from lowland tribes living downstream, Yanomamo and the like. I remember him telling me one story the day before he left. The Kothoga, according to a Yanomamo informant, had made a deal with a being called Zilashkee. This was a creature like our Mephistopheles, but even more extreme: all the evil and death in the world emanated from this thing, which slithered around on the peak of the tepui. Or so the legend went. Anyway, according to their arrangement, the Kothoga would get the Zilashkee’s child for a servant in return for killing and eating all of their own children, and vowing forevermore to worship him and only him. When the Kothoga had finished their grisly task, the Zilashkee sent his child to them. But the beast proceeded to run rampant through the tribe, murdering and eating people. When the Kothoga complained, the Zilashkee laughed and said: What did you expect? I am evil. Finally, using magic or herbal spells or some such thing, the tribe managed to control the beast. It couldn’t be killed, you see. So the Zilashkee child remained under the control of the Kothoga, and they used it to do their own malignant bidding. But using it was always a dangerous proposition. The legend says that the Kothoga have been looking for a way to get rid of it ever since.”
Relic (Pendergast, Book 1) Page 19