The Book of the Dead Page 14

  Bulke paused to catch his breath. A twilight gloom had descended. The face casts hung everywhere on the walls, white faces with their eyes closed, each one with a name attached. They all seemed to be Indians: Antelope Killer, Little Finger Nail, Two Clouds, Frost on Grass…

  “Think all these are death masks?” asked Morris.

  “Death masks? What do you mean, death masks?”

  “You know. When you’re dead, they take a cast of your face.”

  “I wouldn’t know. Say, how about another shot of Mr. Beam?”

  Morris obligingly removed the flask. Bulke took a swig, passed it back.

  “What’s that?” Morris asked, gesturing with the flask.

  Bulke peered in the indicated direction. A wallet lay tossed in the corner, spread open, credit cards spilling out. He went over, picked it up.

  “Shit, there must be two hundred bucks in here. What do we do?”

  “Check out who it belongs to.”

  “What does that matter? Probably one of the curators.” Bulke searched through, pulled out the driver’s license.

  “Jay Mark Lipper,” he read, then looked at Morris. “Oh, shit. That’s the missing guy.”

  Feeling a strange stickiness, he looked down at his hand. It was smeared with blood.

  Bulke dropped the wallet with a jerk, then kicked it back into the corner with his foot. He felt abruptly nauseous. “Man,” he said in a high, strained voice. “Oh, man…”

  “You think the killer dropped it?” Morris asked.

  Bulke felt his heart thumping in his chest. He looked around at all the shadowy spaces, the shelves covered with the leering faces of the dead.

  “We gotta call Manetti,” said Morris.

  “Gimme a moment… Just gimme a moment here.” Bulke tried to think through a fog of surprise and rising fear. “Why didn’t we see this on the way in?”

  “Maybe it wasn’t there.”

  “So the killer’s up ahead.”

  Morris hesitated. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  Bulke felt blood pounding in his temples. “If he’s in front of us, we’re trapped. There’s no other way out.”

  Morris said nothing. His face looked yellow in the dim light. He pulled out his radio.

  “Morris calling Central, Morris calling Central. Do you read?”

  A steady hiss of static.

  Bulke tried his radio, but the result was the same. “Jesus, this frigging museum is full of dead spots. You’d think with all the money they’ve spent on security, they’d put in a few more repeaters.”

  “Let’s start moving. Maybe we’ll get reception in another room.” And Morris started forward.

  “Not that way!” Bulke said. “He’s ahead of us, remember?”

  “We don’t know that. Maybe we missed the wallet on the way in.”

  Bulke looked down at his bloody hand, the nausea growing in his gut.

  “We can’t just stay here,” Morris said.

  Bulke nodded. “All right. But move slowly.”

  It was now twilight in the attics, and Bulke slipped his flashlight out of its holster and flicked it on. They moved through the doorway to the next attic, Bulke flashing the light around. This space was crammed with elongated heads carved from black volcanic stone, packed so tightly that the two could just squeeze down the center.

  “Try your radio,” Bulke said in a low voice.

  Again, nothing.

  The attic corridor took a ninety-degree angle into a tight warren of cubicle-like rooms: rusted metal shelves stacked with cardboard cartons, each carton overflowing with tiny glass boxes. Bulke shone his light over them. Each contained a huge black beetle.

  As they reached the end of the third cubicle, a crash came from the darkness ahead of them, dying away in a rattle of falling glass.

  Bulke jumped. “Crap! What was that?”

  “I don’t know,” said Morris. His voice was trembling and strained.

  “He’s ahead of us.”

  As they waited, another crash came.

  “Jesus, sounds like someone’s trashing the place.”

  More shattering glass, followed by a bestial, inarticulate scream.

  Bulke backed up, groping for his own radio. “Bulke calling Central! Do you read?”

  “This is Central Security, ten-four.”

  Crash! Another gargled scream.

  “Jesus, we got a maniac up here! We’re trapped!”

  “Your location, Bulke?” came the calm voice.

  “The attics, building 12! Section 5, maybe 6. Someone’s up here, tearing up the place! We found the missing victim’s wallet, too. Lipper’s. What do we do?”

  A hiss of static, the reply breaking up.

  “I can’t read you!”

  “… retreat… do not engage… back…”

  “Retreat where? We’re trapped, didn’t you hear me?”

  “… do not approach…”

  Another deafening crash, closer this time. The stench of alcohol and dead specimens wafted back through the darkness. Bulke backed up, screaming into the radio. “Send up the cops! Get a SWAT team up here! We’re trapped!”

  More static.

  “Morris, try yours!”

  When Morris didn’t answer, Bulke turned. The radio lay on the floor, and Morris was running like hell down the crooked passageway, away from the noise, disappearing into the gloom.

  “Morris! Wait!” Bulke tried to ship the radio, dropped it instead, and heaved along after Morris, putting one huge slow thigh after the other, desperately trying to overcome the inertia of his enormous body. He could hear the tearing, smashing, screaming thing coming up behind him, fast.

  “Wait! Morris!”

  A shelf covered with specimen jars went over with a massive crash behind him, and there was the sudden ripping stench of alcohol and rotting fish.

  “No!”

  Bulke lumbered forward as awkwardly as a walrus, groaning with both fear and effort, his fleshy arms and chest jiggling with each footfall.

  Another scream, feral and chillingly inhuman, tore the darkness just behind him. He turned but could see nothing in the darkness except the flash of metal, the dim blur of movement.

  “Noooo!”

  He tripped and fell, the flashlight hitting the floor and rolling away, the beam wobbling crazily off the rows of jars before spotlighting a gape-mouthed fish floating upside down in a jar. He struggled, clawing the floor, trying to rise, but the screaming thing fell upon him as swiftly as a bat. He rolled, swatting feebly at it, hearing the tearing of cloth and then feeling the sudden biting sting of his flesh being slashed.

  “Noooooooo-!”

  Chapter 24

  Nora sat at a small baize-covered table in an open vault of the Secure Area, waiting. She was surprised at how easy it had been to gain access-Menzies had been instrumental in helping her with the paperwork. The fact was that very few curators, even the top ones, were allowed access without jumping through all sorts of bureaucratic hoops. The Secure Area wasn’t just used for storing the most valuable and controversial collections-it was also where some of the museum’s most sensitive papers were kept. It was a mark of how important the Tomb of Senef was to the museum that she had gotten access so quickly-and after five o’clock, at that, even while the museum was in a state of high alert.

  The archivist appeared from the gloomy file room carrying a yellowing folder, placed it in front of her. “Got it.”

  “Great.”

  “Sign here.”

  “I’m expecting my colleague, Dr. Wicherly,” she said, signing the form and handing it back to the archivist.

  “I have the paperwork for him all ready to go.”

  “Thank you.”

  The woman nodded. “I’ll lock you in now.”

  The archivist shut the vault door, leaving Nora in silence. She stared at the slender file, feeling a prickle of curiosity. It was marked simply Tomb of Senef: correspondence, documents, 1933-35.

  She opene
d it. The first item was a typewritten letter, on elaborate stationery with a gold and red embossing. It was written by the Bey of Bolbassa, and it must have been the one described in the newspaper articles Nora had seen, full of assertions that the tomb was cursed-an obvious ploy to get the tomb back for Egypt.

  She turned to the next documents: lengthy police reports from one Detective Sergeant Gerald O’Bannion, handwritten in the beautiful script once standard in America. She scanned the reports with interest, then reviewed the mass of papers beyond: memos and letters to city officials and the police in what appeared to have been a successful effort to squelch the real story described in the police reports and keep it from the press. She paged through the documents, fascinated by the tale they told, finally understanding why the museum had been so anxious to shut down the tomb.

  She jumped when a faint tone announced that the vault door was opening. Turning, she saw the sleek, dapper form of Adrian Wicherly, leaning against the metal jamb, smiling.

  “Hello, Nora.”

  “Hi.”

  He straightened up, giving his suit a little tug, adjusting his already perfect Windsor knot. “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a dusty old place like this?”

  “Have you signed in?”

  “Je suis en règle,” he said with a little laugh, coming forward and leaning over her shoulder. She could smell expensive aftershave and mouthwashed breath. “What have we here?”

  The archivist looked in. “Ready to be locked in?”

  “Do. Lock us in.” And Wicherly winked at Nora.

  “Why don’t you take a seat, Adrian?” she said coolly.

  “Don’t mind if I do.” He pulled an old wooden chair up to the table, dusted the seat with a swipe of a silk handkerchief, and eased himself down.

  “Any skeletons in the closet?” he asked Nora, leaning in.

  “Definitely.”

  Wicherly was a bit too close and Nora edged away as subtly as she could. Although Wicherly had initially come across as the acme of good breeding, lately his smarmy winks and fingertip caresses had led her to believe he was operating more on the glandular level than she had initially thought. Still, things had remained on a professional level and she hoped they would continue that way.

  “Do tell,” Wicherly said.

  “I’ve just skimmed the documents, so I don’t have the full story, but here it is in brief. On the morning of March 3, 1933, the guards arriving to open the tomb realized it had been broken into. A lot of objects were vandalized. The mummy was missing, later found in an adjacent room, badly mutilated. When they looked in the sarcophagus, they found a different body in it. A freshly murdered body, as it happened.”

  “Amazing! Just like that fellow, what’s-his-name. DeMeo.”

  “Sort of, except the resemblance stops there. The body belonged to Julia Cavendish, a wealthy New York socialite. She just happened to be the granddaughter of William C. Spragg.”

  “Spragg?”

  “He was the man who bought the tomb from the last Baron Rattray and had it shipped to the museum.”

  “I see.”

  “Cavendish was a patroness of the museum. She appears to have had a rather notorious reputation as-well, for want of a better term, a female rake.”

  “How so?”

  “She went to bars and picked up young working-class men-longshoremen, stevedores, and the like.”

  “And did what with them?” Wicherly asked with a leer.

  “Use your imagination, Adrian,” she said dryly. “Anyway, her body had been mutilated, but the papers don’t offer details.”

  “Strong stuff for the thirties, I should say.”

  “Yes. The family and the museum were desperate to cover it up-for different reasons, of course-and it seems they managed quite nicely.”

  “I imagine the press was a bit more cooperative in those days. Not the muckraking chaps we have today.”

  Nora wondered if Wicherly knew her husband was a reporter. “Anyway, the investigation into Cavendish’s murder was still ongoing when it happened again. This time the mutilated body belonged to Mongomery Bolt, apparently a collateral descendant of John Jacob Astor, a remittance man and a sort of black sheep in the family. The tomb was now being guarded at night, but the murderer sapped the guard before dumping Bolt’s body in the sarcophagus. A note was found on the body. There’s a copy of it in this file.”

  She pulled out a yellowed sheet. On it was an Eye of Horus and several other hieroglyphs. Wicherly looked at it in bemusement.

  “‘The Curse of Ammut Strikes All Who Enter,’” he intoned. “Whoever wrote this was ignorant. The chap barely knew his hieroglyphs. They aren’t even drawn properly. A crude fake.”

  “Yes. They realized that right away.” She turned over some more papers. “Here’s the police report on that crime.”

  “The plot thickens.” Wicherly winked, edged his seat closer.

  “The police took notice of the link to John Jacob Astor. He’d helped finance the installation of the Tomb of Senef. The police began to wonder if someone wasn’t taking revenge on those responsible for bringing the tomb to the museum. Naturally, their suspicions fell on the Bey of Bolbassa.”

  “The fellow who claimed the tomb was cursed.”

  “Right. He’d gotten the newspapers all stirred up against the museum. Turns out he wasn’t even a real bey-whatever that is. There’s a report here on his background.”

  Wicherly picked it up, sniffed. “Former carpet merchant, made a lot of money.”

  “Again, the museum, along with the Astor family, was able to successfully quash any publicity-except it was impossible to stop the rumors circulating inside the museum itself. In time, the authorities established that the Bey of Bolbassa had returned to Egypt just before the killings, but they suspected he had hired operatives in New York. If he did, though, they were too clever to get caught. And when the third killing occurred-”

  “Another?”

  “This time it was an elderly lady who lived in the neighborhood. It took them a while to figure out the connection-turns out she was distantly descended from Cahors, the man who originally found the tomb. By now, the museum was boiling with rumors, and they were spreading to the general populace. Every crank spiritualist, medium, and tarot-card reader was converging on the museum, and New Yorkers were only too eager to believe the tomb was really cursed.”

  “Credulous fools.”

  “Perhaps. In any case, it just about emptied the museum. The police investigation wasn’t going anywhere, and so the museum decided to take preemptive action. Using the pretext of the construction of the 81st Street station pedestrian tunnel, they closed the tomb and sealed it up. The killings stopped, the rumors gradually died down, and the Tomb of Senef was mostly forgotten.”

  “And the murder cases?”

  “Never solved. Although they were convinced the bey was behind them, they couldn’t get proof.”

  Wicherly rose from his chair. “That’s quite a story, Nora.”

  “It certainly is.”

  “What are you going to do with it?”

  “On the one hand, it might make an interesting sidebar to the history of the tomb. But I have a sense the museum wouldn’t be too keen on publicizing it, and I’m not sure I’d like to, either. I’d rather focus on the archaeology, on teaching people about ancient Egypt.”

  “I agree with you, Nora.”

  “There’s another reason, maybe even more important. This new murder in the museum-it has some resemblances to the old ones. People will talk, rumors will start.”

  “Rumors have already started.”

  “Well, yes. I’ve been hearing quite a few myself. At any rate, we don’t want anything derailing this opening.”

  “Very true.”

  “Good. I’ll write Menzies a report, with our recommendation that none of this is relevant and that it shouldn’t be publicized.” She closed the folder. “That settles it, then.”

  There was a silence. Wic
herly had risen from his seat and was once again standing behind her, glancing down at the scattered papers of the file. He reached over and picked one up, perused it, put it back down. She felt his hand on her shoulder and stiffened.

  A moment later, she felt his lips on the nape of her neck, barely touching her skin, caressing her as lightly as a butterfly.

  She rose abruptly and turned. He stood close to her, blue eyes flashing. “I’m sorry if I startled you.” He smiled, displaying his porcelain rack. “I couldn’t help myself. I find you devastatingly attractive, Nora.”

  He continued smiling at her, radiating self-confidence and charm, elegant and more handsome than any man deserved to be.

  “In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m married,” she said.

  “We’ll have a grand time and nobody need ever know.”

  “I will know.”

  He smiled, put a caressing hand on her shoulder. “I want to make love to you, Nora.”

  She took a deep breath. “Adrian, you’re a charming and intelligent man. I’m sure that many women would like to make love to you, too.”

  She could see his smile broadening.

  “But I’m not one of them.”

  “But, my lovely Nora-”

  “Wasn’t that plain enough for you? I haven’t the slightest interest in making love to you, Adrian-even if I weren’t married.”

  Wicherly stood there, dumbfounded, his face struggling to comprehend the sudden reversal of his expectations.

  “I don’t mean to be insulting, just unambiguous, since my earlier efforts to telegraph my lack of interest don’t seem to have penetrated. Please don’t make me be any more hurtful than necessary.”

  She saw the blood drain from his face. His easy self-possession vanished for a moment, exposing what Nora had begun to suspect: a spoiled child blessed with good looks and brilliance, who had developed the firm belief that whatever he wanted, he should get.

  He began to stammer something that might have been intended as an apology, and Nora let her voice soften. “Look, Adrian, let’s just forget it, okay? This never happened. We’ll never mention it again.”