The Bone Vault

by Linda Fairstein

  “I never knew about that,” Mamdouba said.

  “Neither did I,” Poste was quick to add.

  Anna Friedrichs was annoyed. “I told both of you, I know I did.” The two men looked at each other and were either truly puzzled by her statement or had a similar talent for playing dumb. “Erik, really. Elijah. I made a point of telling you and asking you to keep the confidence. I was afraid she’d be jumpy if she was alone in this place late at night.”

  This was exactly what Mike wanted to happen. He wanted to divide the united front, which was most often an artificial response to the unwelcome entry of a law enforcement agency, and find out what fractionalized these colleagues. What drew the fire in the belly of both museums, where ninety percent of their collections lay under wraps?

  “It’s clear Katrina had a long-standing interest in medieval art. That was her training and education. That’s what she came to the Met to do. And yet here she was, leaving New York and returning to Africa in December to pursue an entirely new direction.”

  “If I may say, Miss Cooper”-it was Mamdouba speaking-“I believe it was her father’s health that was the main reason for her decision to go home.”

  A bit late for that, I thought to myself. Something else had to be at the bottom of her change of focus. I counted on Clem to help us figure that out later tonight, but we also needed to see what these curators thought.

  “We haven’t heard from you, Mr. Socarides. Tell us your impressions of Katrina.”

  He had seemed content to be resting his head against the back of his chair, letting the others take the lead. He sat upright, slowly. “Never met her until we started to put the show together. Loved her animals, the girl did. Endeared herself to me.”

  “What was it about them that you think attracted her?”

  “Who doesn’t like animals, Ms. Cooper?” He became animated, wagging a finger at me. “Now on your television crime shows,that would be your serial killer. Someone who hated furry creatures, tortured them as a child. Isn’t that always the way to find the killer?”

  “I’m talking about the victim for the moment. What was it she liked about your animals?”

  “This exhibition is all about animals, young lady. Katrina found examples of dozens of symbolic beasts from her medieval art, and then I introduced her to the real ones. Okapi, elands, Grevy’s zebras, reticulated giraffes.”

  “Dead ones.”

  “Well, obviously, Mr. Chapman. This is a museum, not a zoological society.”

  “The ones you stuff for display?”

  “Precisely.”

  “She ever watch you-or your staff-prepare one of those mountings?”

  “No. Not that I’m aware of. The beasts and the bones, she liked both of those. I don’t think she liked the whole process of using the skins to re-create the animals. A bit too Hannibal Lecter for her, I’m sure.”

  “What do you mean by ‘the beasts and the bones’?”

  “Well, Ms. Cooper, Katrina loved the animals. They were all African, keep in mind. Maybe that’s what she liked. And she had a real fascination with the bones. Never tired of looking at the bones. Wanted to know everything I knew about the bones.”

  Millions of them, as I recalled. Not so unusual, I thought to myself, for a woman whose specialty was funerary art.

  “And I must interject, Anna,” Socarides said, before he slumped back into his seat. “Nobody ever told me the girl had been raped. I don’t know what you’re making such a fuss of it for.”

  “I never claimed to have toldyou about it, Richard. I had no idea she was so taken with your, your…beasts,” she said dismissively. Anna was determined to show off her close relationship to Katrina. “In fact, I had no idea you’d paid her a bit of mind outside this room.”

  It was ordinarily my habit to interview each witness alone, which we would attempt to do later on, but Mike’s idea to bring the group together brought out talons on each that might not have been visible one-on-one.

  “You seem to think you had the market cornered on her friendship, Anna. She was actually quite surprised to learn how weak the Met’s history was in your very own specialty, African art.”

  “Katrina was hardly what I would call African, would you, Elijah? She was Dutch. Boer. About as primitive as Erik.” Anna laughed at her inside joke.

  “Are you Dutch, too?” I asked Poste, remembering that Ruth Gerst had told us his father was a great explorer and hunter who had taken museum trustees on African safaris and shoots.

  “Yes, by birth. But we moved here when I was a child, and I grew up in the States.” He seemed embarrassed by the petty squabbling among the museum staff members.

  “What did Mr. Socarides mean when he said your department at the Met was weak?”

  Anna went on, “Until very recently in museum terms-the late 1960s-the Metropolitan had no interest in what we call the primitive arts. We were terribly underrepresented in my field. The trustees at the time looked on all of it as sort of airport art-Mayan sculptures, African masks, New Guinea ancestor poles. It wasn’t until Nelson Rockefeller gave his entire collection to the museum that we began to be competitive in this field.”

  Mamdouba’s irrepressible grin reemerged. “Ah, tell the truth, Anna. Most of your distinguished trustees think all these aboriginal faces belong inour museum, don’t they?”

  Bellinger and Poste had to smile along with him. But Anna snapped, “These are works of art, Elijah, every bit as beautifully crafted as the sculptures of the ancient Greeks. In your museum they just become cultural specimens, totem poles stuck next to igloos and canoes.”

  “I’m glad Timothy Gaylord isn’t here,” Socarides said. “He’d be apoplectic hearing you compare some of those drooping-breastedNational Geographic figures of yours to his precious Egyptian carvings.”

  Mamdouba bowed his head in my direction. “This is a centuriesold dispute, Miss Cooper, not likely to be resolved today. Miss Friedrichs and I often battle for acquisitions. My colleagues and I believe that primitive objects are much better respected under our aegis.”

  Friedrichs walked to the coffeemaker and refilled her cup. People shuffled papers and pretended not to notice the silence.

  Mike Chapman tried another topic. “I’m gonna ask you to do some word association now. What do you think of when I say the wordvault? What does it mean in your work, or in the museum?”

  Friedrichs didn’t want to play anymore. She looked straight ahead and ignored the question. I thought of her disorderly conduct arrest and imagined her planted in the middle of the street with her picket sign in defiance of police instructions to move on.

  Erik Poste leaned forward, his hand on his chest. “I suppose I can give you the definition, Detective. It’s an architectural term, illustrated quite often in paintings. In fact, you both saw vaulted areas the day we took you around the basement of the Met. Vaults are a series of arches that radiate from a central point, used to make a roof in a building’s interior.”

  “In my business, that’s what the medievalists called burial chambers. They were mostly underground, in churches and cathedrals, so they were called vaults,” Bellinger said.

  “Funny how it conjures such a different image to me,” Socarides said. “Those are our storage cabinets. I’ve got my assorted mammal bones in tusk vaults and boar vaults and shrew vaults. But then, Erik’s my expert on museum history, if that’s what you’re looking for. Grew up in these places-it’s in his blood.”

  I thought again of our conversation with Ruth Gerst about Poste’s father. Erik might be the one to know something about private vaults.

  “I understand that there are some personal storage rooms that wealthy contributors were able to keep in the museums.” I looked to Mamdouba. “Might you have a list of those names?”

  “Not here, madam. We’ve had no such thing that I’m aware of.” The smile had vanished and he was quite firm in his denial.

  “Are you saying you’re not aware of any, or that there aren’t an
y? I’m going to ask you to check with President Raspen and consult your archives. Surely, Mr. Poste, you know something about that tradition.”

  Everyone turned to stare at Erik Poste. “I, uh, I know they’ve been rumored to exist at the Met. Three or four of them at most.”

  Mike wanted to prove to the group that he had this on better information than rumor. “The Arthur Paglin vault. Others like that?”

  Poste shrugged his shoulders. “Paglin had the great Egyptian collection. Gaylord would know more about that than I do.”

  “What became of your father’s collections?” I asked Poste, who had pursued such a different line of scholarship from Willem, as Ruth Gerst had described it to us.

  “You know about him, do you?” He looked pleased that I was familiar with his father’s work.

  “Not very much. But I’ve heard he made great contributions to this museum.”

  “I was twelve years old when he died, Miss Cooper. Killed by native poachers when he was leading an expedition. Greedy and ignorant men who took his life simply because he stood between them and some ivory animal horns. Killed because of the power of their superstition. My older brother, Kirk, remained on, in Kenya, doing my father’s work. He’d be the one to ask about my father’s contributions.”

  “You didn’t stay in Africa?”

  “I was sent off to boarding school in New England. My mother’s health was quite fragile. She was hospitalized for long spells while I was growing up. I developed a preference for art, which was Mother’s influence.”

  “Are any of your father’s things here, in the Natural History museum?”

  Poste extended his hand, palm upward, deferring to Mamdouba. “Oh, surely. Many, many of our finest African exhibits were brought back to us by Willem. I can arrange for you to see a catalog of the items, if you wish,” Mamdouba said.

  Mamdouba played to Chapman now, smiling a bit too broadly. “I imagine by the time you’re through with this investigation, you’ll be asking me to sign you up for one of our safaris, Detective.”

  “Don’t count on it. I’m a Discovery channel guy. The only safari you’ll get me on is in my Naugahyde chair in front of the television set. No mosquitoes, no wild boars, no hungry cannibals. Just tell me if you’ve got any vaults down here, okay, sir?”

  I was ready to break up the group and take them down the hall, one at a time, to an empty lab that had been set aside for us. Mike wanted to ask each of them whether they had known Pablo Bermudez, the worker who fell off the Met roof, and I had scores of questions about their contact with Katrina.

  “Any of you done any foreign travel this year?” Mike asked.

  Each one of them nodded. He threw out a random sampling of foreign cities, then got to London. Both Bellinger and Poste responded that they had been there.

  “When did you go, and with whom?”

  “Can’t be sure of the date,” said Erik Poste. “Late March, if I’m not mistaken. Alone. I’d been to an auction of great Masters in Geneva and stopped there on the way back. Did a bit of museum business at some galleries. Twenty-four-hour layover.”

  “And you?”

  “January,” Bellinger answered. “Pierre Thibodaux took me along. The British Museum was thinking of deaccessioning some medieval objects. He wanted my opinion. Spent an afternoon there with him looking them over.”

  “Just the two of you on the trip?”

  “And Eve. Eve Drexler. Just along for the ride, as far as I could tell. A perk for being a loyal soldier.”

  I put down my coffee and stared across the table at Bellinger. “Museum security’s pretty tight these days. Do you recall signing in and showing any identification to be admitted?”

  Bellinger took a deep breath and closed his eyes. “Probably so. Sure, sure.”

  “Do you remember how Eve Drexler signed in?”

  He ran a finger around the rim of his mug. “I haven’t the faintest idea. There was nothing particularly significant about-”

  There was a knock on the door before Mark Zimmerly opened it and came in.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Mamdouba, but I need to speak with you immediately.”

  Ever careful of his manners, the curator tried to calm the agitated young man. “In just a minute, Zimm. Step outside and I’ll join you shortly.”

  Zimm hesitated before speaking, but looked to Chapman for help and decided not to wait. “You got a third-grade class from Scarsdale, sir. They’re freaking out up there, the kids are screaming bloody murder.”

  Mamdouba stood up and moved briskly to the door, hoping to cut off the next sentence before any of the guests heard whatever the problem was.

  “What is it, Zimm?” Mike asked. He beat the older man to the exit, ready to help.

  “It’s in a diorama, in one of the display cases on the main floor. It’s-it’s…an arm. A severed human arm.”

  26

  The heavily tattooed upper arm of a large man was on the floor inside the glass case.

  In the background, a halo of clouds floated over Box Canyon, above a purple haze that set the background for the jaguar diorama. The three carnivorous felines sat self-satisfied among the cacti and shrubs as they had for fifty years, but now they looked as though they had just enjoyed a fresh meal.

  The slow-moving security guards had closed the gallery and ushered the frightened schoolchildren out of the building.

  Mike and I stood in front of the glass, while Elijah Mamdouba and Richard Socarides had stepped back from the exhibit into the dimly lit corridor. Socarides was doing the curatorial version of “not my job.”

  “Elijah, African mammals is upstairs. I’ve not got a thing to do with the Americans. I couldn’t begin to tell you what’s gone on here.”

  “Looks like that’s got some age on it,” I said to Mike, bending over with my hands on my knees. “Like it had been tanned, almost, and preserved. Like an animal hide.”

  He had stepped away briefly to call his lieutenant and ask for the Crime Scene Unit to come over to do a run.

  “Mr. Mamdouba, how do you get into these things, these dioramas?”

  “Quite difficult, Mr. Chapman. Most of these are sealed. It’s really a big production to get inside. When we do restoration, or when we touch up those wonderful background paintings, we have to remove the entire plate-glass window.”

  “I’m a bit more familiar with these, Detective. If Elijah doesn’t mind. There’s a door on the side of each diorama. Locked, of course. But above each one is a catwalk.”

  “A catwalk?”

  “Technicians have to get inside every few months to change the lightbulbs. We’ve had terrible problems with lighting, you see. Fluorescent bulbs damaged many of the animals. Faded my poor zebra stripes terribly. It’s narrow up on top, but that would be the way to drop something in with the animals.”

  “And the keys to those doors, who would have them?”

  “Everyone who works in restoration, most of the tech guys, and there are probably a few masters floating around among curators and even custodians.” Socarides reached into his pocket and came out with a chain, isolating a small key. He started to walk to the bronze door alongside the diorama.

  “Whoa, buddy. We got a larceny here. Stolen limb, I suppose, and maybe a trespass. I got a couple of guys on the way over here to dust for prints and retrieve that arm from the case. Let’s not be putting our paws on anything just yet.”

  It took almost an hour for the two detectives to arrive at the museum with their boxes of equipment. They set about meticulously examining the doorway before one of them climbed up to the catwalk. It was set fifteen feet above the diorama, so they ended up calling for a custodial crew and directed the removal of the window.

  I waited for them to remove the arm with their gloved hands before trying to look it over.

  “This guy’s got some miles on him,” Mike said. “Glad to know we didn’t screw up the commissioner’s body count overnight.”

  A small sticker was taped to the ski
n on its underside. Mike read from the tag: “68.3206.”

  He turned to Mamdouba. “Looks like a museum exhibit. Year and acquisition number.”

  The director of curatorial affairs seemed to be relieved. “That’s a Metropolitan object. It’s not our tracking system. What a cruel joke this is.”

  “They got human arms in an art museum?”

  Mamdouba shrugged his shoulders.

  I wrote the number on my legal pad. We would be seeing Thibodaux later today. I took Mike to the side while the detectives got the information they needed to complete their paperwork from Mamdouba.

  “What’s your guess?”

  “Sometime between the close of business yesterday, and admission time this morning, some clown decided to feed the jaguars. Is it an unconnected bad joke? Or a message for the two of us? Maybe Katrina’s killer is trying to throw us off guard. Depends on who has control of this grotesque piece of art. Must have been lifted out of some museum storage area.”

  “If her killer works here, maybe he’s trying to get us to look harder at someone at the Met,” I suggested. “Or vice versa. Shake us up a bit.”

  “He shook Mamdouba, all right. Human body parts, no matter how ancient and laminated, can’t be good for the crowds.”

  We waited until the severed arm had been photographed and vouchered as evidence before making our way back down to the underground quarters of the exhibition. It was after two o’clock, and none of the members present for our morning meeting had remained to finish the interviews.

  Zimm was around the corner in his office. “Sorry I sounded so freaked out when I interrupted your meeting this morning. You wouldn’t have believed the commotion upstairs. There’s a message for you to call your office, Ms. Cooper.”

  I looked at the slip of paper. “Laura called. Good news.”

  Zimm offered his desk phone and stepped out of the room with Mike, who was suggesting he keep his ears open to see what the scoop would be about the arm in the diorama.

  I dialed Laura. “Just a minute, Alex. I’ll patch you through to Ryan.”

  A moment of silence, then, “Alex? It went like clockwork. My Internet perv, Frederick Welch III, is now in custody.”