The Bone Vault

by Linda Fairstein

  “Where the exhibition offices are? See any of the-”

  “No, you heard Clem. Can’t get there from here. It’s spookier than shit.”

  “Herps.” Mamdouba again.

  “What?”

  “Snakes. Herpetology. They’re all dead, Mr. Wallace.”

  “You still do not want to be in there. Tank after tank-pythons, constrictors, anacondas-all in some kind of alcohol solution.”

  “You see anyone?”

  “Nope. This one’s a labyrinth of storerooms and closets. Racks of metal shelves on wheels with specimens. I left the cop who followed on that side. Call him some backup, will you? Still as a tomb. He’s checking out every inch of it.”

  “Did you get over to-?”

  “The exhibition area? Yeah. Had to climb back up to the lobby and over to where we’ve been in before. Got the kid to go-”

  “Zimm?”

  “Yeah. Told him what happened and sent him-”

  “How’d he react to the news about Clem?”

  “Seemed appropriately freaked out. I have him doing a sweep to see who’s still here, round them up. I’ll go back to meet him and let him take us through every back alley he knows down there. Sarge, I need guys to open every door.”

  “Did Zimm say he knew Clem would be here tonight?”

  “Mike, I didn’t stop to do an interview. I’m trying to find her alive, okay?”

  “Anyone else there?”

  “That sour broad. Anna Friedrichs. She’s dragging up here after me, taking her sweet time.” Mike handed Mercer the basement floor plans that Clem had helped him to decipher. “Take this with you when you go back down. Sarge, your walkie-talkies. Give ‘em up.”

  Mamdouba, who had been speaking on the phone, now turned to us. “Mr. Socarides is still in his office. Mammals. He’ll go with you to the fifth floor, Mr. Chapman. He’s responsible for-well, for many of the bones.”

  “Humans?”

  “Animals. But he knows the storage area.”

  I thumbed through the pages detailing collections and donations.

  “Can he help with these names?”

  “Certainly.”

  “We’ll bring this list with us, then.”

  “You’re not coming, kid. Go with Mercer. Help him.”

  “Stay put, Alex.”

  Mercer didn’t want me in his way either. I wasn’t exactly a goodluck charm.

  Each of them took a few of the men and women in blue and set out on their paths to the nether reaches of the gigantic museum. Twenty-three buildings. Seven hundred and twenty-three rooms. We didn’t need a precinct to search it, we needed an army.

  Now the noise was coming from the street outside. I walked to the window and looked down at the intersection of Columbus Avenue and West Seventy-seventh Street. Dozens of RMP’s were blocking the intersection, and several big trucks of the Emergency Services Unit were positioned beneath the old granite facade. Sirens wailed the arrival of more and more officers, and flashing red bubbles atop black unmarked cars signaled the presence of detectives and police brass.

  Anna Friedrichs looked terrified when she entered the room. “Is Clem all right? Have you found her?”

  I told her how Clem had disappeared. “Did you read her e-mails today? Did you know she was coming to New York?”

  “By the end of the day we all knew she was coming to town to talk with the police. But later in the week, I thought. It was Zimm who just told me she hinted about coming tonight.”

  “He told you that? When?”

  “Now. Just now. She trusted him, I guess. Said she’d look to see if his light was on when she got to the museum. He took that to mean at night. Tonight.”

  “Get him up here.” I flapped my hand in Mamdouba’s direction. “If you can’t reach him by phone, send two of your men to bring him up here immediately. D’you know who else he told?” I asked, turning back to Friedrichs.

  “He’s so upset with himself it’s hard to be sure. He knows he told Erik Poste and Hiram Bellinger. He’s not sure who else was around.”

  I handed her the list of collections and donor names. “How familiar are you with this museum-I mean, the physical layout?”

  “I, uh-I only know about some of the companion works to mine.”

  As curator of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas in the Met, she covered the most primitive societies, the ones to which Clem had introduced Katrina. “Human bones, skeletons, things like that. Can you show us where they’re kept?”

  She looked at Mamdouba for help. “Upstairs? Have you seen the closets on five?”

  “Sarge, give me two men. I want to go up the main staircase and catch up with Chapman. Would you keep looking, Ms. Friedrichs? Any names, anything you see on those lists that might connect us to something-a particular storeroom, a special place, a priceless exhibit-that someone didn’t want Katrina Grooten to find. As soon as Socarides gets here-”

  “I’m ready, Ms. Cooper.” He was standing in the doorway and had his own flashlight in hand. “Anna, let me take a look at those lists.”

  I followed the two police officers into the hallway, anxious to make myself useful in the pursuit. “I think it’s more important that you come with me. She can study the papers. I’ve tracked them against each of your names-all three of you, plus Bellinger, Poste, Thibodaux, Drexler. I don’t know what else I should be looking for.”

  Socarides scanned the papers, as though trying to match names with the faces of people present. The obvious collections that referenced aboriginal artifacts had been circled, as had many of the African and Pacific Islands groupings.

  “You missed one,” he said, slapping the papers with his flashlight. “Goddamn it. You missed Willem. Let’s go there first.”

  Socarides passed us and started jogging toward the huge staircase and up to the fifth floor. I stood frozen in place for a few seconds, certain I had cross-checked every name in my case folder.

  I ran after him, taking the flat marble steps two at a time, pulling myself upward by the brass banister that gleamed against the murky gray walls and plastered ceiling.

  He stopped at the top of the landing to get his bearings, and I reached his side. I remembered what Ruth Gerst had told us. Poste’s father, Willem, had been a great African explorer and adventurer. Erik was on expert on museum history, someone had said. He had grown up in museums. After his father’s death, he came to the States to live, with his mother.

  “Where do we go? I’m sick that I didn’t make the right connection.”

  He was stalking down the hallway as he talked. “Nobody thought to tell you his name and you obviously never thought to ask. A prosecutor should know better than that.”

  “Poste? It’s Willem Poste,” I repeated, trying to keep up with his long strides.

  “Willem Van der Poste, Ms. Cooper,” he said, passing the lists back to me. “Look under theV ‘s. Like many Boers who moved to America after the Second World War, Willem’s widow dropped that formal, aristocratic part of the surname. Too Teutonic. Too Germanic. Look at your papers again and you’ll see all the properties donated to the museum by Willem Van der Poste.”

  Fifty million bones hidden beneath these rooftops and thousands of them had been collected by Erik Poste’s father. Dinosaur fossils, mammalian teeth, human skeletons.

  Socarides was taking me down the endless corridor to find Van der Poste’s bone vault.

  39

  Cops were swarming in and around the fifth-floor offices and storage cabinets. Even with the overhead lights switched on, the hallway was all dark corners and angles, old wooden cabinets with broken drawer pulls filling the wide spaces between doors, and exhibits shrouded in plastic drop cloths covering every flat surface.

  I could hear Mike’s voice a football field or two farther down the way, yelling orders to try to organize the crew that was racing about, testing and yanking doorknobs while waiting for security guards with passkeys to let them into every locked entryway.

  Soca
rides turned a corner and charged off in a perpendicular direction. I shouted to Mike to follow us and kept running after my determined guide.

  The passageway led deep into the museum’s interior. Our footsteps echoed in the immense space of our surroundings, while Mike trotted behind us, calling Clem’s name every few seconds. None of this area was accessible to the public. Cool, dark, and dry, it seemed as remote from the popular displays of the forty exhibition halls that enchanted busloads of schoolchildren as the tip of the Empire State Building appeared looking up at it from the sidewalk.

  We stopped behind Socarides at the old-fashioned door of a small room. It was a solid panel of oak with a foot-wide glass window at eye level. Black lettering that once announced the occupant’s name had long ago been scraped off the pane. The handle wouldn’t give. I stepped back and Socarides smashed against the glass with his flashlight, reaching in to open the door.

  Inside the dreary room, I found the switch and turned on the lights. Fish skeletons. Thousands of them. Stained with a pinkish dye now familiar to me, they emitted a supernatural glow as they rested upright in bottles filled with ethyl alcohol, from the floor of the room to the fourteen-foot ceiling.

  Chapman and Socarides were ahead of me, moving farther along the seemingly abandoned hallway, shattering window after window to get inside cubicles and cabinets, eyeballing their contents, as they worked their way toward a dead end.

  “Next one over. This stuff used to be up here, I know,” Socarides called to us. We ran back to the main hallway and down another lifeless wing of storage space.

  Four more tries at small, dreary rooms yielded an incalculable number of drawers filled with the still bodies of birds. Feathers, beaks, bills, and tiny little vertebrae everywhere.

  Mike slammed the last one behind him and stopped to take a deep breath.

  “Here, Detective. Over here.”

  I followed Mike a few yards farther down the corridor to the twelve-by-twelve-foot storeroom into which Socarides had hacked his way. Both of us stepped inside.

  Human skeletons, six of them suspended full length, hung in a row facing the entrance door. Each of the macabre sextet was hooked at the base of his cracked skull by a shiny brass hinge that attached to the top shelf, several feet above our heads.

  Long, bony fingers met me at eye level, dangling from the chalky remains of these forgotten souls. I half expected them to lift in unison and reach out to grasp some part of my neck or throat.

  Behind them and on each of the walls of this secluded den were stacks and stacks of bones. I swiveled to my left to get out of Mike’s way as he ran his flashlight up and down the space beside the door, looking for light switches. Now I was facing three rows of skulls, human heads with protruding teeth, hollow cheeks, and black sockets that once held eyes which would have returned my stunned gaze dead-on.

  “What’s here? What do you know about this?” Mike asked.

  “It is Willem Van der Poste, Erik Poste’s father,” I said.

  The beams of our three flashlights probing up and down the shelves made it even creepier. I directed the light to the far side of the room to find more skulls, these with hair still clinging to the decaying scalps.

  “Some of these were his. The man amassed a huge collection of African artifacts. But he did it in the employ of dozens of different patrons. Great white hunter kind of thing.”

  “This his private vault?”

  “No, no. He never had the money for that.”

  Leaving that door open, Socarides led us to the adjacent space, letting Mike break into it and scan for better light while he talked. “Rich trustees and museum aficionados back in the twenties and thirties made pilgrimages to the Dark Continent. Some for big game, some for the sheer excitement, some to plunder the ivory and gold and rubber.”

  More bones. The rest of the bodies that must have connected, at one distant time, to the forlorn heads in the room we had just left. Bones in boxes, neatly labeled with a first name or a tribe designation or a simple question mark.

  “Willem’s father was a Boer. Went to South Africa at the turn of the last century. Developed a reputation as the most spectacular shooter of the lot. Bagged half the beasts that made up the basis of the original museum collection here. The man to see, in Africa.”

  Into a third room, stacked again with human remains. Mike stepped back into the hallway and cupped his hands, yelling for reinforcements, then asked, “Whose rooms are these?”

  “They’re not designated as anyone’s. These-thesethings are just waiting here for someone to decide what becomes of them in this age of political correctness. There-up there, Detective.”

  Socarides’s flashlight stopped on something that glinted in the dark. Mike grabbed a bookcase wedged into the space behind the door and slammed it to its side, skulls scattering across the floor. He climbed onto its edge, two feet off the ground, to reach the top few tiers of shelves.

  Guns. A rack of hunting rifles spread out across the uppermost space. “Eight of ‘em up here. Looks like there were a couple more here once, if this was ever full.”

  He wiped his hand to see what amount of dust had accumulated in the several inches that separated the long guns from each other. One level below were pistols and handguns. No way of really knowing how many had been on the shelf earlier than today and whether any had been taken recently.

  Mike stood on his toes and reached behind the row of pistols now clearly visible to me as I tried to give him more light.

  “This one of yours?” He balanced against the sturdy wooden shelf with one hand, handing me a couple of the guns while pulling into Socarides’s view the tip of an elephant tusk that must have been four feet long.

  “Ivory, Detective. Willem Van der Poste’s private insurance policy, if I had to guess. Every hunter had a stash of some sort or other, and his tusks were probably hidden here against the day he’d get back to the States and need to convert them into cash. Sell them on the black market.”

  Mike backed down off the shelf. “Got a few of ‘em up there. Worth what?”

  “Fifteen, maybe twenty thousand apiece. Maybe more.”

  “Nobody back there, Chapman,” a cop called in after checking the rooms beyond us.

  “Open every room. Check every inch of this place.” The uniformed cops hustled as Mike gave out orders. “Where to?”

  Socarides was running out of ideas. “Maybe he got her out of the museum. Maybe they’re not-”

  “That’s great. I’ll let you know when the chief gives me that news. I’m a worst-case scenario kind of guy. I don’t feature ‘em on the Jitney, on their way out to the Hamptons. Where else could you hide inside here? Where else would-?”

  “The basement. I mean, there are several basement areas, each separate and-”

  “I know. We got people down there.”

  “There’s the attic, above us. Vast spaces, locked storerooms. No reason for anyone to be up there, no one to disturb them once they got there.”

  “Can you get to it from the staircase in Mamdouba’s office?”

  “Frankly, I didn’t know there was a staircase in his office. No idea where that leads.”

  Back to the main hallway, Mike was running ahead of Socarides and me, screaming to security guards to point him to the access to the attic. The older man nearest that end of the building was clearly so intimidated that the keys jangled in his grip as he tried to work them in the lock of the massive door. I laid a hand on his forearm and asked him to give them to me, which he seemed eager to do. When I found the right one, Mike leaned against the panel and headed up the stairs.

  Again we followed. Still enveloped in the semidarkness, I tried to orient myself to our location, after having altered our route so many times downstairs. Uniformed cops were coursing through the immense space. If anything could rattle the bones and wake the dead, it would be this stampede of cops who were entirely at home on urban streets, in subway stations, housing projects, and city parks, but thoroughly pe
rplexed by this labyrinth of hidden rooms and concealed closets.

  Chapman had gotten his bearings before I did. “That’s southwest,” he said, pointing. “Mamdouba’s office. That would be the corner the staircase would lead up from.”

  He took off in that direction and I loped behind him. “Coop, give it a whistle.”

  I put two fingers in the corners of my mouth and blew as hard as I could, the cab-stopping kind of signal that could be heard blocks away, that Mike had never mastered. He called out after I got the attention of half of the troops. “Over here. Move all this shit, all these cabinets that are blocking doorways. Anything obstructing any entryway or exit. We’re looking for a woman’s body. Breathing or not. Find her. The guy may be packing.”

  There must have been eight or ten attic areas like this over the entire complex of buildings that made up the museum. This was only one of them. Although it led out of Mamdouba’s corner turret, there was no way to tell whether it connected to the rambling set of contiguous halls.

  “Soc, what’s up there?”

  Under the eaves, still high above our heads, was a steel catwalk. It was not much wider than a balance beam, with chain guylines that bordered it as it crossed the width of the immense room.

  “Never been there, never noticed it. Must be for maintenance, for structural repairs.”

  “Hey, Pavlova, you wanna be useful? Make all those ballet lessons your old man paid for worthwhile? I don’t think my feet’ll fit on the damn thing.”

  I loathed heights as much as I hated vermin, snakes, and spiders.

  “Bird’s-eye view, Coop. Different perspective. Give it a shot.”

  I stepped out of my shoes, handed my flashlight to Mike, and started to climb the rusty rungs of the ladder that was welded in place against the south wall of the room. The metal dug into the middle of my soles as I climbed higher, trying to focus my eyes on a water-stained spot on the wall above my head. Anything not to look back down.