Relic Read online

  Beyond the rusty metal door, a row of light bulbs stretched down a long basement corridor. The floor was covered in shabby linoleum, and the walls were hung with murals of Southwestern Pueblo Indians grinding corn, weaving, and stalking deer.

  [85] “Lovely,” said Pendergast. “A shame they’re down here. They look like early Fremont Ellis.”

  “They used to hang in the Hall of the Southwest,” said Ippolito. “It closed in the twenties, I think.”

  “Ah!” said Pendergast, scrutinizing one of the murals. “It is Ellis. My heavens, these are lovely. Look at the light on that adobe facade.”

  “So,” said Ippolito. “How do you know?”

  “Why,” said Pendergast, “anyone who knows Ellis would recognize these.”

  “I mean, how do you know the killer came through here?”

  “I suppose I was guessing,” said Pendergast, examining the next painting. “You see, when someone says ‘it’s impossible,’ I have this very bad habit, I can’t help myself, I immediately contradict that person in the most positive terms possible. A very bad habit, but one that I find hard to break. But of course, now we do know the killer came through here.”

  “How?” Ippolito seemed confused.

  “Look at this marvelous rendition of old Santa Fe. Have you ever been to Santa Fe?”

  There was a momentary silence. “Er, no,” said Ippolito.

  “There is a mountain range behind the town, called the Sierra de Sangre de Cristo. It means the ‘Blood of Christ Mountains’ in Spanish.”

  “So?”

  “Well the mountains do look quite red in the setting sun, but not, I dare say, that red. That’s real blood, and it’s fresh. A shame, really, it’s ruined the painting.”

  “Holy shit,” said D’Agosta. “Look at that.”

  A broad streak of blood was smeared waist-high across the painting.

  “You know, murder is a messy thing. We should find traces of blood all along this corridor. Lieutenant, we’ll need the crime lab people in here. I think we have your egress, at any rate.” He paused. “Let’s finish our little [86] tour, and then call them in. I’d like to go ahead and look for evidence, if you don’t mind.”

  “Be my guest,” said D’Agosta.

  “Careful where you walk, Mr. Ippolito, we’ll be asking them to check the floors as well as the walls.” They came to a locked door marked RESTRICTED. “This is the Secure Area,” said Ippolito.

  “I see,” said Pendergast. “And what exactly is the point of this Secure Area, Mr. Ippolito? Is the rest of the Museum insecure?”

  “Not at all,” the Security Director replied quickly. “The Secure Area is for storing especially rare and valuable objects. This is the best-protected museum in the country. We’ve recently installed a system of sliding metal doors throughout the Museum. They’re all linked to our computer system, and in the event of a burglary we can seal off the Museum in sections, just like the watertight compartments on a—”

  “I get the picture, Mr. Ippolito, thank you very much,” Pendergast said. “Interesting. An old copper-sheathed door,” he said, examining it closely.

  D’Agosta saw that the copper covering was riddled with shallow dents.

  “Fresh dents, by the look of them,” Pendergast said. “Now, what do you make of this?” He pointed downward.

  “Jesus H. Christ,” breathed D’Agosta, looking at the lower section of the door. The wooden door frame was scored and gouged into a welter of fresh splinters, as if something with claws had been scrabbling at it.

  Pendergast stepped back. “I want the entire door analyzed, if you please, Lieutenant. And now to see what’s inside. Mr. Ippolito, if you would be so kind as to open the door without getting your hands all over it?”

  “I’m not supposed to let anyone in there without clearance.”

  D’Agosta looked at him in disbelief. “You mean you want us to get a damn warrant?”

  [87] “Oh, no, no, it’s just that—”

  “He forgot the key,” said Pendergast. “We’ll wait.”

  “I’ll be right back,” said Ippolito, and his hurried footsteps echoed down the corridor. When he was out of hearing D’Agosta turned to Pendergast. “I hate to say it, Pendergast, but I like the way you work. That was pretty slick, the painting, and the way you handled Ippolito. Good luck with the New York boys.”

  Pendergast looked amused. “Thank you. The feeling is mutual. I’m glad I am working with you, Lieutenant, and not one of these hard-boiled fellows. Judging from what happened back there, you still have a heart. You’re still a normal human being.”

  D’Agosta laughed. “Naw, it wasn’t that. It was the fucking scrambled eggs with ham and cheese and ketchup I had for breakfast. And that crew cut. I hate crew cuts.”

  = 15 =

  The herbarium door was shut, as usual, despite the sign that read DO NOT CLOSE THIS DOOR. Margo knocked. Come on, Smith, I know you’re in there. She knocked again, louder, and heard a querulous voice: “All right, hold your horses! I’m coming!”

  The door opened and Bailey Smith, the old Curatorial Assistant of the herbarium, sat back down at his desk with an enormous sigh of irritation and began shuffling through his mail.

  Margo stepped forward resolutely. Bailey Smith seemed to consider his job a gross imposition. And when at last he got around to things, it was hard to shut him up. Normally Margo would have merely sent down a requisition slip and avoided the ordeal. But she needed to examine the Kiribitu plant specimens as soon as possible for her next dissertation chapter. Moriarty’s write-up was still unfinished, and she’d been hearing rumors of another horrible killing that might shut the Museum down for the rest of the day.

  [89] Bailey Smith hummed, ignoring her. Though he was nearly eighty, Margo suspected he only feigned deafness to annoy people.

  “Mr. Smith!” she called out. “I need these specimens, please.” She pushed a list over the counter top. “Right away, if possible.”

  Smith grunted, rose from his chair, and slowly picked up the list, scanning it disapprovingly. “May take awhile to locate, you know. How about tomorrow morning?”

  “Please, Mr. Smith. I’ve heard they might close down the Museum at any moment. I really need these specimens.”

  Scenting the chance to gossip, the old man became friendlier. “Terrible business,” he said, shaking his head. “In my forty-two years here I’ve never seen anything like it. But I can’t say I’m surprised,” he added, with a significant nod.

  Margo didn’t want to get Smith going. She said nothing.

  “But not the first, from what I hear. And not the last, either.” He turned with the list, holding it in front of his nose. “What’s this? Muhlenbergia dunbarii? We don’t have any of that.”

  Then Margo heard a voice behind her.

  “Not the first?”

  It was Gregory Kawakita, the young Assistant Curator who had accompanied her to the staff lounge the previous morning. Margo had read the Museum’s bio of Kawakita: born to wealthy parents, orphaned young, he had left his native Yokohama and grown up with relatives in England. After studying at Magdalene College, Oxford, he moved to M.I.T. for graduate work, then on to the Museum and an assistant curatorship. He was Frock’s most brilliant protégé, which made Margo occasionally resentful. To her, Kawakita didn’t seem the kind of scientist who’d wish to be allied with Frock. Kawakita had an instinctual sense for Museum politics, and Frock was controversial, an iconoclast. But despite [90] his self-absorption, Kawakita was undeniably brilliant, and he was working with Frock on a model of genetic mutation that no one but the two of them seemed to fully understand. With Frock’s guidance, Kawakita was developing the Extrapolator, a program that could compare and combine genetic codes of different species. When they ran their data through the Museum’s powerful computer, the system’s throughput was reduced to such a degree that people joked it was in “hand calculator mode.”

  “Not the first what?” asked Smith, giving Kawakita an
unwelcoming stare.

  Margo flashed a warning glance at Kawakita, but he continued. “You said something about this murder not being the first.”

  “Greg, did you have to?” Margo groaned sotto voce. “I’ll never get my plant specimens now.”

  “I’m not surprised by any of this,” Smith continued. “Now, I’m not a superstitious man,” he said, leaning on the counter, “but this isn’t the first time some creature has prowled the halls of the Museum. At least that’s what people say. Not that I believe a word of it, mind you.”

  “Creature?” asked Kawakita.

  Margo gave Kawakita a light kick in the shins.

  “I’m only repeating what everyone’s talking about, Dr. Kawakita. I don’t believe in starting false rumors.”

  “Of course not,” said Kawakita, winking at Margo. Smith fixed Kawakita with a stern glare. “They say it’s been around a long time. Living down in the basement, eating rats and mice and cockroaches. Have you noticed there aren’t any rats or mice loose in the Museum? There should be, God knows they’re all over the rest of New York. But not here. Curious, don’t you think?”

  “I hadn’t noticed,” said Kawakita. “I’ll make a special effort to check that out.”

  “Then there was a researcher here who was breeding [91] cats for some experiment,” Smith continued. “Sloane I think his name was, Doctor Sloane, in the Animal Behavior Department. One day a dozen of his cats escaped. And you know what? They were never seen again. Vanished. Now that’s kind of funny. You’d expect one or two at least to show up.”

  “Maybe they left because there weren’t any mice to eat,” said Kawakita.

  Smith ignored him. “Some say it hatched from one of those crates of dinosaur eggs brought back from Siberia.”

  “I see,” said Kawakita, trying to suppress a grin. “Dinosaurs loose in the Museum.”

  Smith shrugged. “I only say what I hear. Others think it was something brought back from one of the graves they’ve robbed over the years. Some artifact with a curse. You know, like the King Tut curse. And if you ask me, those fellows deserve what they get. I don’t care what they call it, archaeology, anthropology, or hoodooology, it’s just plain old grave robbing to me. You don’t see them digging up their grandmother’s graves, but they sure don’t hesitate to dig up somebody else’s and take all the goodies. Am I right?”

  “Absolutely,” said Kawakita. “But what was that you said about these murders not being the first?”

  Smith looked at them conspiratorially. “Well, if you tell anybody I told you this I’ll deny it, but about five years back, something strange happened.” He paused for a minute, as if to gauge the effect his story was having. “There was this curator, Morrissey, or Montana, or something. He was involved with that disastrous Amazon expedition. You know the one I mean, where everyone was killed. Anyway, one day he simply vanished. Nobody ever heard from him again. So people started to whisper about it. Apparently, a guard was overheard saying that his body had been found in the basement, horribly mutilated.”

  [92] “I see,” Kawakita said. “And you think the Museum Beast did it?”

  “I don’t think anything,” Smith responded quickly. “I’m just telling you what I’ve heard, that’s all. I’ve heard a lot of things from a lot of people, I can tell you.”

  “So has anyone seen this, ah, creature?” Kawakita asked, unsuccessfully stifling a smile.

  “Why, yessir. Couple of people, in fact. You know old Carl Conover in the metal shop? Three years ago now he says he saw it, came in early to get some work done and saw it slouching around a corner in the basement. Saw it right there, plain as day.”

  “Really?” said Kawakita. “What’d it look like?”

  “Well—” Smith began, then stopped. Even he finally noticed Kawakita’s amusement. The old man’s expression changed. “I expect, Dr. Kawakita, that it looked a bit like Mr. Jim Beam,” he said.

  Kawakita was puzzled. “Beam? I don’t believe I know him—”

  Bailey Smith suddenly roared with laughter, and Margo couldn’t help grinning herself. “George,” she said, “I think he meant that Conover was drunk.”

  “I see,” said Kawakita stiffly. “Of course.”

  All his good humor had vanished. Doesn’t like having the joke turned on him, Margo thought. He can dish it out, but he can’t take it.

  “Well, anyway,” said Kawakita briskly, “I need some specimens.”

  “Now, wait just a minute!” Margo protested as Kawakita pushed his own list onto the counter. The old man eyed it and peered at the scientist.

  “Week after next okay?” he asked.

  = 16 =

  Several floors above, Lieutenant D’Agosta sat in a huge leather sofa in the curator’s study. He smacked his lips contentedly, propped one chubby leg upon the knee of the other, and looked around. Pendergast, absorbed in a book of lithographs, was reclining in an armchair behind a desk. Above his head, in a gold rococo frame, hung a massive Audubon painting depicting the mating ritual of the snowy egret. Oak paneling with a century’s patina ran along the walls above a beadboard wainscot. Delicate gilded lights of hand-blown glass hung just below the pressed tin ceiling. A large fireplace of elaborately carved Dolomite limestone dominated one corner of the room. Nice place, D’Agosta thought. Old money. Old New York. It has class. Not the place to smoke a two-bit cigar. He lit up.

  “It’s come and gone two-thirty, Pendergast,” he said, exhaling blue smoke. “Where the hell do you think Wright is?”

  [94] Pendergast shrugged. “Trying to intimidate us,” he said, turning another page.

  D’Agosta looked at the FBI agent for a minute.

  “You know these Museum big shots, they think they can keep anybody waiting,” he said finally, watching for a reaction. “Wright and his cronies have been treating us like second-class citizens since yesterday morning.

  Pendergast turned another page. “I had no idea the Museum had a complete collection of Piranesi’s Forum sketches,” he murmured.

  D’Agosta snorted to himself. This should be interesting, he thought.

  Over lunch, he’d made a few surreptitious calls to some friends in the Bureau. Turned out they’d not only heard of Pendergast, but they’d heard several rumors about him. Graduated with honors from some English university—probably true. A special forces officer who’d been captured in Vietnam and had later walked out of the jungle, the only survivor of a Cambodian death camp—D’Agosta wasn’t sure about that one. But he was revising his opinion nevertheless.

  Now the massive door opened silently and Wright came in, the Security Director at his heels. Abruptly, Wright sat down opposite the FBI agent. “You’re Pendergast, I suppose,” the Director sighed. “Let’s get this over with.”

  D’Agosta sat back to watch the fun.

  There was a long silence while Pendergast turned pages. Wright shifted. “If you’re busy,” he said irritably, “We can come back another time.”

  Pendergast’s face was invisible behind the large book. “No,” he said finally. “Now is a good time.” Another page was leisurely turned. Then another.

  D’Agosta watched with amusement as the Director reddened.

  “The Security Director isn’t needed for this meeting,” came the voice from behind the book.

  [95] “Mr. Ippolito is part of the investigation—”

  The agent’s eyes suddenly appeared over the spine of the book. “I’m in charge of the investigation, Dr. Wright,” Pendergast said quietly. “Now, if Mr. Ippolito would be so kind—?”

  Ippolito glanced nervously at Wright, who flicked his hand in dismissal.

  “Look, Mr. Pendergast,” Wright began as the door closed. “I’ve got a Museum that needs running, and I don’t have much time. I hope this can be brief.”

  Pendergast laid the open book carefully on the desk in front of him.

  “I’ve often thought,” he said slowly, “that this early classicist stuff of Piranesi’s was his best. Do
you agree?” Wright looked utterly astonished. “I fail to see,” he stammered, “what that has to do with—”

  “His later work was interesting, of course, but too fantastical for my taste,” Pendergast replied.

  “Actually,” said the Director in his best lecture voice, “I’ve always thought—”

  The book slammed shut like a shot. “Actually, Dr. Wright,” Pendergast said tightly, his courtly manner gone, “it’s time to forget what you’ve always thought. We’re going to play a little game here. I’m going to talk, and y’all are going to listen. Understood?”

  Wright sat speechless. Then his face mottled in anger. “Mr. Pendergast, I will not be spoken to in that manner—”

  Pendergast cut him off. “In case you haven’t read the headlines, Dr. Wright, there have been three grisly murders in this Museum in the last forty-eight hours. Three. The press is speculating that some kind of ferocious beast is responsible. Museum attendance is down fifty percent since the weekend. Your staff is very upset, to put it mildly. Have you bothered taking a stroll through your Museum today, Dr. Wright? You might find it edifying. The feeling of dread is almost palpable. Most [96] people, if they leave their offices at all, travel in twos and threes. The maintenance staff is finding any reasons it can to avoid the Old Basement. Yet you prefer to act as if nothing is wrong. Believe me, Dr. Wright, something is extremely wrong.”

  Pendergast leaned forward, and slowly folded his arms on top of the book. There was something so menacing in his deliberateness, so cold in his pale eyes, that the Director sat back involuntarily. D’Agosta unconsciously held his breath. Then Pendergast continued.

  “Now we can handle this one of three ways,” he said. “Your way, my way, or the Bureau’s way. So far, your way has been far too much in evidence. I understand that the police investigation has been subtly obstructed. Phone calls are returned late, if at all. Staff are busy or not to be found. Those who are available—such as Mr. Ippolito—have not proven particularly useful. People are late to appointments. Why, it’s enough to make one suspicious. As of now, your way is no longer acceptable.”