Relic Page 3

  He centered himself at the front of the room, hiked up his pants, removed his cigar, picked a piece of tobacco off his tongue, and cleared his throat. “May I have your attention, please,” he said. “A situation has arisen that’s going to require you to bear with us for a while.”

  Suddenly, a voice rang out accusingly from the back of the room. “Ex-cuse me, Mister?...”

  Margo craned her neck over the crowd. “Freed,” Kawakita whispered. Margo had heard of Frank Freed, a testy Ichthyology curator.

  The man in brown turned to look at Freed. “Lieutenant D’Agosta,” he rapped out. “New York City Police Department.”

  It was a reply that would have shut most people up. Freed, an emaciated man with long gray hair, was undaunted. “Perhaps,” he said sarcastically, “we may be informed of what exactly is going on around here? I think we have a right …”

  “I’d like to brief you on what happened,” D’Agosta resumed. “But at this point, all we can say is that a body has been found on the premises, under circumstances we are currently investigating. If—”

  At the explosion of talk, D’Agosta wearily held up his hand.

  [26] “I can only tell you that a homicide squad is on the scene and that an investigation is in progress,” he continued. “Effective immediately, the Museum is closed. For the time being, no one may enter, and no one may leave. We expect this to be a very temporary condition.”

  He paused. “If a homicide has occurred, there is a possibility, a possibility, that the killer is still inside the Museum. We would merely ask you to remain here an hour or two while a sweep is conducted. A police officer will be around to take your names and titles.”

  In the stunned silence that followed, he left the room, closing the door behind him. One of the remaining policemen dragged a chair over to the door and sat down heavily in it. Slowly, the conversations began to resume. “We’re being locked in here?” Freed cried out. “This is outrageous.”

  “Jesus,” Margo breathed. “You don’t suppose Prine is a murderer?”

  “Scary thought, isn’t it?” Kawakita said. He stood up and went to the coffee machine, beating the last drops out of the urn with a savage, blow. “But not as scary as the thought of being unprepared for my presentation.”

  Margo knew Kawakita, young fast-track scientist that he was, would never be unprepared for anything.

  “Image is everything today,” Kawakita went on. “Pure science alone doesn’t get the grants anymore.”

  Margo nodded again. She heard him, and she heard the swirl of voices around them, but none of it seemed important. Except for the blood on Prine’s shoes.

  = 5 =

  “Listen up,” the policeman said an hour later. “You’re free to go now. Just be sure to stay out of the areas behind the yellow tape.”

  Margo raised her head from her arms with a start as a hand landed on her shoulder. Tall, lanky Bill Smithback clutched two spiral notebooks in the other hand, and his brown hair looked, as usual, as if he’d just gotten out of bed. A chewed pencil was tucked behind one ear, his collar was unbuttoned and his grimy tie knot pulled down. The perfect caricature of a hard-driving journalist, and Margo suspected he cultivated the look. Smithback had been commissioned to write a book about the Museum, focusing on the Superstition exhibition that would open next week.

  “Unnatural doings at the Natural History Museum,” Smithback muttered darkly in her ear as he folded himself into a chair beside her. He slapped his notebooks on the table, and a flood of handwritten papers, unlabeled computer diskettes, and photocopied articles [28] covered with yellow highlighting spilled across the Formica surface.

  “Hello, Kawakita!” Smithback said jovially, slapping him on the shoulder. “Seen any tigers lately?”

  “Only the paper variety,” Kawakita replied dryly.

  Smithback turned to Margo. “I suppose you must know all the gory details by now. Pretty nasty, huh?”

  “They didn’t tell us anything,” Margo said. “All we’ve heard is some talk about a killing. I guess Prine must have done it.”

  Smithback laughed. “Charlie Prine? That guy couldn’t kill a six-pack, let alone a biped. No, Prine just found the body. Or should I say, them.”

  “Them? What are you talking about?”

  Smithback sighed. “You really don’t know anything, do you? I was hoping you’d heard something, sitting in here for hours.” He sprang up and went over to the coffee urn. He tipped and rattled and cursed it and came back empty handed. “They found the Director’s wife, stuffed in a glass case in the Primate Hall,” he said after settling himself in the chair again. “Been there twenty years before anyone noticed.”

  Margo groaned. “Let’s hear the real story, Smithback,” she said.

  “All right, all right,” he sighed. “Around seven-thirty this morning, the bodies of two young boys were found dead in the Old Building basement.”

  Margo pressed a hand to her mouth.

  “How did you learn all this?” Kawakita demanded.

  “While you two were cooling your heels in here, the rest of the world was stuck outside on Seventy-second Street,” Smithback went on. “They’d shut the gates on us. The press was out there, too. Quite a few, in fact. The upshot is, Wright’s going to give a press conference in the Great Rotunda at ten to quell the rumors. All that zoo talk. We’ve got ten minutes.”

  “Zoo talk?” Margo pressed.

  “It’s a zoo around here. Oh, God. What a mess.” [29] Smithback was savoring not telling what he knew. “Seems the murders were pretty savage. And you know the press: They’ve always assumed you’ve got all sorts of animals locked up in here.”

  “I think you’re actually enjoying this,” Kawakita smiled.

  “A story like this would add a whole new dimension to my book,” Smithback went on. “The shocking true account of the grisly Museum killings, by William Smithback, Junior. Wild, voracious beasts roaming deserted corridors. It could be a best-seller.”

  “This isn’t funny,” Margo snapped. She was thinking that Prine’s laboratory wasn’t far from her own office in the Old Building basement.

  “I know, I know,” Smithback said good-humoredly. “It is terrible. The poor kids. But I’m still not sure I believe it. It’s probably some gimmick of Cuthbert’s to boost publicity for the exhibition.” He sighed, then started guiltily. “Hey, Margo—I was really sorry to hear about your father. I meant to tell you earlier.”

  “Thanks.” Margo’s smile held little warmth.

  “Listen, you two,” Kawakita said, rising, “I really have to—”

  “I heard you were thinking of leaving,” Smithback continued to Margo. “Dropping your dissertation to work at your father’s company, or something.” He looked at her curiously. “Is that true? I thought your research was finally getting somewhere.”

  “Well,” Margo said, “yes and no. Dissertation’s dragging a bit these days. I’ve got my weekly eleven o’clock with Frock today. He’ll probably forget, as usual, and schedule something else, especially with this tragedy. But I hope I do get in to see him. I found an interesting monograph on the Kiribitu classification of medicinal plants.”

  She realized that Smithback’s eyes had already started to wander, and reminded herself once again that most people had no interest in plant genetics and [30] ethnopharmacology. “Well, I’ve got to get ready.” Margo stood up.

  “Hold on a minute!” Smithback said, scrambling to gather up his papers. “Don’t you want to see the press conference?”

  As they left the staff lounge, Freed was still complaining to anyone who would listen. Kawakita, already trotting down the hall ahead of them, waved over his shoulder as he rounded a bend and disappeared from sight.

  They arrived in the Great Rotunda to find the press conference already in progress. Reporters surrounded Winston Wright, Director of the Museum, poking microphones and cameras in his direction, voices echoing crazily in the cavernous space. Ippolito, the Museum’s Secur
ity Director, stood at the Director’s side. Clustered around the periphery were other Museum employees and a few curious school groups.

  Wright stood angrily in the quartz lights, fielding shouted questions. His usually impeccable Savile Row suit was rumpled, and his thin hair was drooping over one ear. His pale skin was gray, and his eyes looked bloodshot.

  “No,” Wright was saying, “apparently they thought their children had already left the Museum. We had no prior warning. ... No, we do not keep live animals in the Museum. Well, of course, we have some mice and snakes for research purposes, but no lions or tigers or anything of that sort. ... No, I haven’t seen the bodies. ... I don’t know what kind of mutilation there was, if any. ... I don’t have the expertise to address that subject, you’ll have to wait for the autopsies. ... I want to emphasize that there’s been no official statement made by the police. ... Until you stop shouting I won’t answer any more questions. ... No, I said we do not have wild animals in the Museum. ... Yes, that includes bears. ... No, I’m not going to give any names. ... How could I [31] possibly answer that question? ... This press conference is over. ... I said this press conference is over. ... Yes, of course we are cooperating in every way with the police. ... No, I don’t see any reason why this should delay the opening of the new exhibition. Let me emphasize that the opening of Superstition is right on schedule. ... We have stuffed lions, yes, but if you’re trying to imply. ... They were shot in Africa seventy-five years ago, for Heaven’s sake! The zoo? We have no affiliation with the zoo. ... I’m simply not going to respond to any more outrageous suggestions along those lines. ... Will the gentleman from the Post please stop shouting? ... The police are interviewing the scientist who found the bodies, but I have no information on that. ... No, I don’t have anything more to add, except that we’re doing everything we can. ... Yes it was tragic, of course it was. ...”

  The press began to fan out, heading past Wright into the Museum proper.

  Wright turned angrily toward the security director. “Where the hell were the police?” Margo heard him snap. As he turned, he said over his shoulder, “if you see Mrs. Rickman, tell her to come to my office immediately.” And he stalked out of the Great Rotunda.

  = 6 =

  Margo moved deeper into the Museum, away from the public areas, until she reached the corridor called ‘Broadway.’ Stretching the entire length of the Museum—six city blocks—it was said to be the longest single hallway in New York City. Old oaken cabinets lined the walls, punctuated every thirty feet by frostedglass doors. Most of these doors had curators’ names in gold leaf edged in black.

  Margo, as a graduate student, had only a metal desk and a bookshelf in one of the basement labs. At least I have an office, she thought, turning off from the corridor and starting down a narrow flight of iron stairs. One of her graduate-student acquaintances had only a tiny battered school desk, wedged between two massive freezers in the Mammalogy Department. The woman had to wear heavy sweaters to work, even at the height of August.

  A security guard at the bottom of the stairwell waved her on, and she moved down a dim tunnel, flanked on [33] both sides by mounted horse skeletons in ancient glass cases. No police tape was in sight.

  In her office, Margo dropped her carryall beside her desk and sat down. Most of the lab was actually storage for South Seas artifacts: Maori shields, war canoes, and cane arrows stuffed into green metal cabinets that stretched from floor to ceiling. A hundred-gallon fish tank, a simulated swamp belonging to the Animal Behavior Department, perched on an iron frame underneath a battery of lights. It was so overpopulated with algae and weeds that Margo had only rarely been able to catch sight of a fish peering out through the murk.

  Next to her desk was a long worktable with a row of dusty masks. The conservator, a sour young woman, worked in angry silence, spending what seemed barely three hours each day at her task. Margo figured it took her about two weeks to conserve each mask, judging by the slow turnover. The particular mask collection she was assigned to contained five thousand such masks, but it didn’t seem to concern anyone that, at the rate she was going, the project would take close to two centuries to complete.

  Margo logged onto her computer terminal. A message in green letters appeared, swimming into focus out of the depths of the CRT:

  HELLO MARGO GREEN@BIOTECH@STF

  WELCOME BACK TO MUSENET

  DISTRIBUTED NETWORKING SYSTEM,

  RELEASE 15-5

  COPYRIGHT © 1989-1995 NYMNH

  AND CEREBRAL SYSTEMS INC.

  CONNECTING AT 10:24:06 03-27-95

  PRINT SERVICE ROUTED TO LJ56

  YOU HAVE NO MESSAGE(S) WAITING

  [34] She went into word-processing mode and called up her notes, preparing to review them before her meeting with Frock. Her adviser often seemed preoccupied during these weekly meetings, and Margo was constantly scrambling to give him something new. The problem was, there usually wasn’t anything new—just more articles read, dissected, and stuffed into the computer; more lab work; and maybe ... maybe ... another three or four pages of her dissertation. She understood how somebody could end up a permanent rider on the government-grant gravy train, or what the scientists derisively referred to as an ABD—All But Dissertation.

  When Frock had first agreed to act as her adviser two years before, she half suspected some mistake had been made. Frock—intellect behind the Callisto Effect, occupier of the Cadwalader Chair in Statistical Paleontology at Columbia University, Chairman of the Evolutionary Biology Department at the Museum—had chosen her as a research student, an honor awarded to only a handful each year.

  Frock started his career as a physical anthropologist. Confined to a wheelchair by childhood polio, he had nonetheless done pioneering fieldwork that was still the basis of many textbooks. After several severe bouts with malaria made further field research impossible, Frock diverted his ferocious energy to evolutionary theory. In the mid 1980s, he had started a firestorm of controversy with a radical new proposal. Combining chaos theory and Darwinian evolution, Frock’s hypothesis disputed the commonly held belief that life evolved gradually. Instead, he postulated that evolution was sometimes much less gradual; he held that short-lived aberrations—“monster species”—were sometimes an offshoot of evolution. Frock argued that evolution wasn’t always caused by random selection, that the environment itself could cause sudden, grotesque changes in a species.

  [35] Although Frock’s theory was backed by a brilliant series of articles and papers, much of the scientific world remained dubious. If bizarre forms of life exist, they asked, where are they hiding? Frock replied that his theory predicted rapid demise of genera as well as rapid development.

  The more the experts called Frock misguided, even crazy, the more the popular press embraced his idea. The theory became known as the Callisto Effect, after the Greek myth in which a young woman is suddenly transformed into a wild creature. Although Frock deplored the widespread misconceptions of his work, he shrewdly used his celebrity to further his academic efforts. Like many brilliant curators, Frock was consumed by his research; sometimes, Margo suspected, everything else, including her work, bored him.

  Across the room, the conservator got up and—without a word—left for lunch, a sure sign that it was approaching eleven o’clock. Margo scribbled a few sentences on a sheet of paper, cleared the screen, and scooped up her notebook.

  Frock’s office was in the southwest tower, at the end of an elegant, Edwardian fifth-floor corridor; an oasis far from the labs and computer workstations that characterized much of the behind-the-scene Museum. The heavy oak door of the inner office read simply, DR. FROCK.

  Margo knocked.

  She heard a great clearing of the throat and the low rumble of a wheelchair. The door opened slowly and the familiar ruddy-complexioned face appeared, bushy eyebrows knitted in surprise. Then his gaze brightened.

  “Of course, it’s Monday. Come in.” He spoke in a low voice, touching her wrist with a plump hand an
d motioning her to an overstuffed chair. Frock was dressed, as usual, in a somber suit, white shirt, and loud paisley tie. His thick brush of white hair looked ruffled.

  The walls of his office were lined with old, glassfronted bookcases, many of the shelves filled with relics [36] and oddities from his early years in the field. Books were piled in enormous, tottering stacks against a wall. Two large bow windows looked out over the Hudson River. Upholstered Victorian chairs sat on the faded Persian carpet, and on Frock’s desk lay several copies of his latest book, Fractal Evolution.

  Next to the books, Margo recognized a large chunk of gray sandstone. Embedded in its flat surface was a deep depression, oddly smudged and elongated along one end with three large indentations at the other. According to Frock, this was a fossil footprint of a creature unknown to science: the single piece of physical evidence to support his theory of aberrant evolution. Other scientists differed: Many didn’t believe it was a fossil at all, calling it “Frock’s folly.” Most of them had never seen it.

  “Clear away that stuff and sit down,” Frock said, wheeling back to his favorite spot under one of the bow windows. “Sherry? No, of course, you never do. Silly of me to forget.”

  On the indicated chair lay several back issues of Nature and the typescript of an unfinished article titled “Phyletic Transformation and the Tertiary ‘Fern Spike.’ ” Margo moved them to a nearby table and sat down, wondering if Dr. Frock would mention something about the deaths of the two little boys.

  He looked at her for a moment, motionless. Then he blinked, and sighed. “Well, Miss Green,” he said. “Shall we begin?”

  Disappointed, Margo flipped open her notebook. She skimmed her notes, then began explaining her analysis of Kiribitu plant classification and how it related to her next dissertation chapter. As she spoke, Frock’s head gradually dropped to his chest and his eyes closed. A stranger might think him asleep, but Margo knew Frock was listening with intense concentration.