“And Eve Drexler used it, to get into the British Museum with you and Bellinger.”
“Drexler’s twice her age. Didn’t anyone check the photograph?”
Thibodaux’s arrogance was unquenchable. “Now who do you think would bother to look at her plastic tag once they recognized me? There I am, director of the Metropolitan Museum, bringing two members of my staff to an executive meeting.”
Chapman knew now that Thibodaux had been lying the first time we met him, when he looked at the photograph of Katrina but denied knowing who she was. “That title, director of the Met-the title you used to have-you think that cloaks you with the power to do whatever you want, say whatever suits you?”
Thibodaux ignored him. But what did his lies conceal? Some knowledge of Katrina’s fate, or just a strategy to keep himself out of a brewing scandal?
I thought of Katrina’s letter of resignation that Bellinger had showed to us when we were first in his office. The single initial of the signature had appeared to be so easy to imitate.
“Did anyone else impersonate Ms. Grooten after her disappearance last winter?”
“Her resignation, Miss Cooper. We believed that she had left us voluntarily. She hadn’t gone missing, so far as we knew. And no, I’m not aware of any other instances.”
“Her employee identification, what became of that?”
“Miss Drexler would know. Or perhaps Bellinger. I never gave any more thought to Katrina after that day.”
Few people had, it seemed to me.
“Before we go, Mr. Thidobaux, we’d like to make arrangements to see the museum’s private vaults this week.”
“Ah, now I know the culprit, Mr. Chapman. You’ve given up your source. Madam Gerst? A pity how a little jealousy can stir up such a pot of trouble. Arthur Paglin’s vault.”
“That one, and the others.”
He looked Mike straight in the eye. “Which others, in particular?”
“I’m expecting you to tell us that.”
“I’ll have to check with our patrons, of course. It is not our privilege to enter them.”
“It’ll be my privilege with a search warrant.”
I’d need a lot more specificity about their location to get any judge to sign off on a warrant, but I didn’t blame Mike for trying.
“I’ll get to work on that first thing in the morning. There are only two that I know of presently, besides the Paglin estate.”
“It’s an interesting concept, these vaults. Didn’t anyone ever try the same gimmick over at Natural History?” I asked.
Thibodaux seemed delighted to point a finger across the park. “Every museum has its hiding places, Miss Cooper. Secret compartments, if you will. Elijah Mamdouba hasn’t shown you the skeletons in his closet?”
27
Clem’s flight had been delayed by thunderstorms west of London. When Mercer called to tell us that he had picked her up and was on his way to the hotel, Mike and I checked into her suite and directed security to bring them right up to the room.
Mike turned on the television in the living room and gnawed on an apple from an elegant arrangement of complimentary fruit and wine. He listened to a cycle of headline news then moved toJeopardy! Before going to commercial break, Trebek announced that the final category was “Patriotic Poems.”
I put my twenty on the mahogany side table and Mike did the same. “You may be Ms. Iambic Pentameter, but I get the prize for patriotic.”
Trebek read the final answer, printed in the cobalt blue box that was enlarged on the screen. “‘Author of poem, regarded as our national hymn, composed while standing on Pike’s Peak.’”
“Suck it up, Chapman. It’s mine.”
“Wait, blondie. It’s not Key, ‘cause he didn’t say national anthem. What the hell’s the one that Kate Smith used to sing?” I shook my head. “Hymn? Like ’Mine eyes have seen-‘”
I swept the money off the table. “Who is Katharine Lee Bates?”
“You’re right, Mrs. Falkowicz,” Trebek told the only one of the three contestants, a librarian from Boone, North Carolina. “She wrote ‘America the Beautiful’ as a poem, and never even met the gentleman who set it to music, using a song found in a church hymnal.”
“Wellesley College, class of 1880.”
“So you had the alumni advantage this time. That’s almost like cheating.”
“And there’s a street named after her in Falmouth, Massachusetts, which I drive by every time I take the ferry to the Vineyard. You’ve got to get around more, Mikey.”
The door buzzer rang and I went to open it. Standing beside Mercer Wallace’s six-foot-six frame was a woman barely five feet tall. Her dark brown skin and luminous green eyes were framed by a helmetlike shock of straight black hair. She stepped into the room and looked up at me as I introduced myself.
“I’m Clem. Clementine Qisukqut.”
“Mike Chapman. I’m a homicide detective. I’m handling Katrina’s case.”
Mercer carried her small bag into the bedroom and placed it on the luggage rack.
“I’m sure you’re exhausted. If at all possible, we’d really like to get started with some questions this evening.”
“That’s fine. All I did was sit the entire day. May I just clean up a bit?” She excused herself and went inside, returning to the living area ten minutes later.
We all settled into comfortable sofas and armchairs and let Clem begin. She seemed anxious to tell us about Katrina Grooten.
“I met Katrina a couple of years ago, not long after she started working at the museum. It was a year before we began to spend time together on the joint museum show.”
“But you were at Natural History, is that right?”
“Yes. I had a friend who was in the last year of a postdoc here in the States. He worked at the Cloisters before he went back to Europe. I met Katrina at a party at his apartment. It was a regular thing he did, to get some of the foreign students together. It gets quite lonely here, as you can imagine, since most of us arrive without family or a network of friends.”
“Did you two become close?”
“Not right away. We didn’t have that much in common. Our backgrounds were so entirely different, and our professional interests were, too. There’s probably no small museum more beautiful than the Cloisters, but I don’t quite see the relevance of Gothic art and architecture. I couldn’t connect to whatever it was that fascinated Katrina.”
“You’re an anthropologist?”
“Yes. A cultural anthropologist.” She smiled. “And it was quite the same for Katrina. She couldn’t fathom my interest in primitive civilizations, even though the entire history of evolution was the underpinning of my work.”
“How did that change?”
“Slowly. Mutual acquaintances kept bringing us together, unintentionally, of course. If there was an exhibit at the Met that one of the graduate students thought would interest others of us, someone would call or e-mail and we’d end up hanging out together. Sometimes go to dinner afterward, usually in a small group.
“It was early last year, when the office for the bestiary show was set up at my museum, that she began to spend time at Natural History.”
Clem had kicked off her shoes and had her feet curled up beneath her. “Would you mind very much if I had a drink?”
Mike walked to the cabinet under the television and unlocked the minibar. “Name it.”
“Any Jack Daniel’s there? I’ll take it neat.”
He poured two small bottles into a cut-crystal glass.
“I’m afraid I’m not your typical scholarly grad student. I’m a bit friskier than most, which is why I was booted out of here. I guess the first time I pushed Katrina’s buttons was when I tried to do a little rabble-rousing about the meteorite.”
Chapman was intrigued. He could sense that there was a more interesting undercurrent in the anthropologist’s personality than he had expected. “No offense, Clem, but I can’t see that’s there much to get too work
ed up about in these great old museums. Space rocks?”
“Ah, but you’re so white. Sorry, Mr. Wallace. You and Ms. Cooper, just like Katrina.”
Mercer laughed.
“‘The Mighty Quinn,’” Mike repeated. “Let’s get right down to it, Clem. I was expecting a full-out Eskimo, and here you are with these piercing green eyes and no whale blubber.”
“Danish mother, Mr. Chapman. Greenland’s a dependency of Denmark. My mother went there to teach school when she was twenty-two. Married my father. Eskimos as long as the island’s been inhabited.” She lifted a clump of her shiny black hair and it fell back in place. “The hair and the skin, those genes were pretty dominant.”
“What does that have to do with a meteorite?”
“The Willamette Meteorite, the centerpiece of the museum planetarium, you know it?”
“Yeah. Great hunk of rock. It’s the largest one in the world, isn’t it?”
“Fifteen and a half tons. And it was found in Oregon, on land that belonged to an Indian tribe. Clackamas Indians. The meteorite crashed to earth thousands of years ago. Museum explorers brought it back here and it’s been on display since 1906, almost one hundred years.”
“What’s the beef?”
Clem was doing a good job on her bourbon. “To the Indians, the meteorite had great spiritual significance. It was something the tribe worshiped for centuries, representing a union between the earth, the sky, and the water.”
“Didn’t they sue to get it back?” I asked.
“Yes, and a few years ago there was a settlement. The tribe dropped its claims for repatriation in exchange for the museum’s agreement to use the meteorite for education about its religious and cultural history. But there was a snag.”
Mike was responding to Clem’s enthusiasm. He listened attentively.
“Turns out before the deal was made, the museum had cut off a twenty-eight-pound chunk.”
He laughed.
“You think I’m being silly? You know how much a collector will pay for a piece of a rare meteorite? Thousands of dollars anounce. That twenty-eight-pound chunk is worth millions. Literally, millions.”
“What became of it?”
“The museum traded the whole thing to a private collector, in exchange for a small piece of a meteorite from Mars. What does that guy do? He starts auctioning off tiny slices.”
“Pissed off the Indians?”
“And me.”
“So you rallied the troops?”
“You bet I did. Just a grassroots effort to help the Indians. We even got two of the buyers, including a chiropractor in Oregon-how’s that for spiritual?-to donate smaller pieces of the Willamette slivers back to the tribe. I think it was Katrina’s first attempt to understand the sacred nature of a primitive people.”
“Wasn’t any of her South African background-”
“Think about it, Mike. May I call you Mike? Katrina’s parents lived their lives under the apartheid system. She was born into that society, educated in white schools. Goes off to study in England and France, and what becomes of her? Immerses herself in medieval studies, which transported her even farther away from the real world. She needed a soul, the girl did, and I tried to give it to her.”
“This was before she was attacked?”
“Raped? In the park? Yeah. We began to make ourselves a bit unpopular with the administration here last spring. Didn’t matter for her, because she worked for the Met. For me, it meant trouble. Had a sit-down with Mamdouba. Given a good talking-to. Stick to my specimens and stay out of museum affairs.”
Mike sat forward on the edge of his chair. “I’ve heard a lot of motives for murder, Clem. I’m finding it hard to think a girl could die for slivers of rock.”
“You’re quite right about that, Mike. It’s the bones. I do believe she died for the bones.”
28
“What do you know about my country? Any of you?”
Mercer and I were silent. Mike spoke. “In 982, Erik the Red was banished from Iceland for manslaughter and shipped there. World’s largest island. Pulled the wool over your ancestors’ eyes. Went back and told everybody his new home was a ‘green land’ to make it more attractive, so he’d have some company there with him. That’s about as much as I learned. Sorry.”
“Not bad, as far as you went.” She put down her glass and talked with her hands as she told her story. “My father’s family comes from a very small village. It’s called Qaanaag. Way up on the northwestern part of Greenland, in the Arctic region.”
“No wonder you drink your bourbon without ice.”
“You don’t know what cold is. Polar Eskimos. A very small community of people, pretty well isolated from the rest of the world. And odd how my life is so wound up in this museum. Robert Peary had been searching for the North Pole since the 1880s.”
“The admiral?” I asked.
“Only a lieutenant then,” Mike said.
“The man who was president of the Natural History Museum at the time, Morris Jesup, struck a deal with Peary. Got him leave from the navy and financing for his expedition to find the pole, if Peary would agree to collect zoological specimens and geological information.” Clem winked at Mike. “Guess what Peary set out to collect?”
“No clue.”
“A meteorite. Something the Eskimos called the Iron Mountain.”
“You’re hung up on these rocks.”
“At the time, it was the largest one that had been found. It took him three years of attempts before he was able to bring it back on his ship. Landed at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in 1897. It took fourteen teams of horses to cart this treasure to the museum.
“But Peary had much more valuable cargo on board.”
“Like what?”
“Inuits. Six human beings, from this remote little tribe that had less than 250 members. They had helped Peary over the years with his travels, his hunting, and his collecting. They had come to trust him and work with him. He and his crew were the only white people they knew.”
“But why did he bring them to New York?”
“He was considered a great man of science, Alex. That would be his reason, of course. But they were treated as spectacles and oddities, by the press and public.”
“Was this the first time he’d brought people to New York?”
“Alive, yes.”
“Surely he didn’t bring dead ones?”
“The year before this trip he had exhumed a family of Eskimos from their native burial ground-favorites of his, whom he had befriended on his earlier voyages. There was a father, a mother, and their young daughter who had died in a recent epidemic, and had just been buried.”
“Whatever for?”
“He sold them to the museum.”
“Butwhy?”
“Skeletons, skulls. For display. So rich white people could gawk at the aborigines. So scientists could study the Northern races.”
“And on this trip?”
“Four adults. Two of them were widowers with young children. So there was a little girl, and a little boy who came, too. Along with five barrels filled with Eskimo remains from freshly dug graves.” She closed her eyes and paused. “My great-grandmother was in one of those barrels.”
The thought was unimaginable. No one spoke until Clem did. “She was better off than the ones who were breathing.”
“Those who were alive, where did they live?”
“You’ve been to the great Natural History Museum? The six Eskimos were made to live in the basement of the museum.”
“How could they possibly live in the basement?” The thought of the dank, dark place was forbidding in this day and age. How inhumane to have placed them there more than a century ago, before modern plumbing, temperature control, and electric lighting.
“Not well, is the obvious answer. People came to stare at the brown-skinned curiosities. Literally, journalists and curiosity-seekers crawled on the sidewalk to peek through the grating into the basement windows.”
“Did they ever get out of the museum?”
“They had to, but not by choice. They became ill. The New York City heat was overwhelming to them. They caught colds, which developed into pneumonia for five of them. Tuberculosis for another. And all six of them wound up in Bellevue Hospital as patients. When their health improved, they were released back to the museum. Someone had the foresight to fix up more comfortable living quarters, on the sixth floor, where the caretaker was housed.”
“Were they-?”
“Within six months of their arrival, two of the adults had died. Sadly, one of them was Qisuk, the leader, which left his little boy orphaned. Alone here in a strange world with no family or friends. The child didn’t speak the language and only three other survivors spoke his.”
“Didn’t these officials think of taking the survivors, especially these children, back to their homes, to Greenland?” I asked.
“The ice and weather made it impossible to do in the middle of winter.”
“Didn’t anyone care about them?”
“Oh, yes, of course. One of the kindest was a museum employee named William Wallace. I think he was the superintendent of buildings at Natural History. He and his wife took little Mene into their home. He became part of their family. He was tutored in English, went to school with the Wallaces’ son, became quite a good athlete and a relatively happy child. But within the year, each of the other five Eskimos who had arrived with him in New York had died.”
“What did they tell the boy about his poor father?”
“Museum officials had learned a great deal about polar Eskimo funeral rites from Peary. They decided that the best thing to do, for Mene’s sake, was to reproduce the traditional burial ceremony that his tribesmen performed at home. The boy had turned eight and was old enough to understand what was being done, and to remember the dignity with which his father was to be honored.”
“So what’d they do?”
“Well, Mr. Wallace and some members of the scientific staff gathered on the museum grounds, in a lovely secluded courtyard behind one of the main buildings. The records show that the service was conducted at just about sunset.”
The Bone Vault Page 27