The Book of the Dead Page 8

  “I want nothing from you,” Constance said, but the hatred and conviction in her voice had ebbed into confusion.

  He held her gaze a moment longer. Then-slowly, very slowly-he turned and walked away, toward the library exit. “Good-bye, Constance,” he said quietly over his shoulder. “Take care. I’ll see myself out.”

  Constance sat rooted in place as she listened to his departing footsteps. Only when silence had returned did she rise from her chair.

  As she did so, something moved in the handkerchief pocket of her crinoline.

  She started. The movement came again. And then a tiny pink nose appeared, bewhiskered and twitching, followed by two beady black eyes and two soft little ears. In wonder, she put her hand in her pocket and cupped it. The little creature climbed up on it and sat upright, his little paws curled as if begging, whiskers trembling, his bright eyes looking pleadingly up into her own. It was a white mouse: sleek, tiny, and perfectly tame-and Constance’s heart melted with a suddenness so unexpected that the breath fled from her and tears sprang into her eyes.

  Chapter 14

  Dust motes drifted in the still air of the Central Archives reading room, and it smelled not unpleasantly of old cardboard, dust, buckram, and leather. Polished oak paneling rose to an elaborately carved and gilded rococo ceiling, dominated by a pair of heavy chandeliers of gilt copper and crystal. Against the far wall stood a bricked-up fireplace of pink marble at least eight feet high and as many wide, and the center of the room was dominated by three massive oaken tables with claw feet, tops laid over with a heavy covering of baize. It was one of the most impressive rooms in the museum-and one of the least known.

  It had been over a year since Nora was last in this room, and despite its grandeur, the memories it evoked were not good. Unfortunately, it was the only place where she could peruse the museum’s most important historic files.

  A faint tap came at the door and the stocky form of Oscar Gibbs entered, his muscular arms piled with ancient documents tied up with twine.

  “There’s quite a lot on this Tomb of Senef,” he said, staggering a little as he laid out the documents on the baize table. “Funny that I never heard of it until yesterday.”

  “Very few have.”

  “It’s become the talk of the museum overnight.” He shook his head, which was shaved as bald as a billiard ball. “Only in a joint like this could you hide an Egyptian tomb.”

  He paused, catching his breath. “You remember the drill, right, Dr. Kelly? I have to lock you in. Just call extension 4240 when you’re done. No pencils or paper; you have to use the ones in those leather boxes.” He glanced at her laptop. “And wear linen gloves at all times.”

  “Got it, Oscar.”

  “I’ll be in the archives if you need me. Remember, extension 4240.”

  The huge bronze door closed and Nora heard the well-oiled click of the lock. She turned to the table. The neat bundles of documents emanated a heavy odor of decay. She looked them over one by one, getting a general sense of what there was and how much of it she actually needed to read. There was no way she could read them all: it would be a question of triage.

  She had asked for accession files to the Tomb of Senef and all related documents in the archives, from its discovery in Thebes to its final 1935 closing as an exhibition. It looked like Oscar had done a thorough job. The oldest documents were in French and Arabic, but they switched to English as the tomb’s chain of ownership went from Napoleon’s army to the British. There were letters, diagrams of the tomb, drawings, shipping manifests, insurance papers, excerpts from journals, old photographs, and scientific monographs. Once the tomb arrived at the museum, the number of documents exploded. A series of fat folders contained construction diagrams, plats, blueprints, conservators’ reports, various pieces of correspondence, and innumerable invoices from the period of the tomb’s construction and opening; and beyond that, letters from visitors and scholars, internal museum reports, more conservators’ evaluations. The material ended with a flurry of documents relating to the new subway station and the museum’s request to the City of New York for a pedestrian tunnel connecting the 81st Street subway station with a new basement entrance to the museum. The final document was a terse report from a long-forgotten curator indicating that the bricking-up of the exhibition had been completed. It was dated January 14, 1935.

  Nora sighed, looking at the spread of bundled documents. Menzies wanted a summary report of them by the following morning so they could begin planning the “script” for the exhibition, drawing up label text and introductory panels. She glanced at her watch: 1:00 P.M.

  What had she gotten herself into?

  She plugged in her laptop and booted it up. At the insistence of her husband, Bill, she had recently switched from a PC to a Mac, and now the boot-up process took a tenth the time-zero to sixty in 8.9 seconds instead of two and a half plodding minutes. It had been like trading up from a Ford Fiesta to a Mercedes SL. As she watched the Apple logo appear, she thought that at least one thing in her life was going right.

  She slipped on a pair of crisp linen gloves and began untying the twine that held the first bundle of papers together, but before she could get the century-old knot undone, the twine parted with a puff of dust.

  With infinite care, she opened the first folder and slipped out a yellowed document, written in a spidery French script, and began the laborious process of working her way through it, taking notes on the PowerBook. Despite her difficulties with the script and the French language, she found herself becoming absorbed in the story Menzies had briefly touched on in the tomb the day before.

  During the Napoleonic Wars, Napoleon had conceived a quixotic plan to follow Alexander the Great’s route of conquest across the Middle East. In 1798, he mounted a huge invasion of Egypt, involving four hundred ships and 55,000 soldiers. In an idea radically modern for the time, Napoleon also brought with him more than 150 civilian scientists, scholars, and engineers, to make a complete scientific study of Egypt and its mysterious ruins. One of these scholars was an energetic young archaeologist named Bertrand Magny de Cahors.

  Cahors was one of the first to examine the greatest Egyptological discovery of all time: the Rosetta stone, which Napoleon’s soldiers had unearthed while digging a fort along the shore. The stone inflamed him with the possibilities that lay ahead. He followed the Napoleonic army as it pushed southward up the Nile, where they came across the great temples of Luxor and, across the river, the ancient desert canyon that became the most famous graveyard in the world: the Valley of the Kings.

  Most of the tombs in the Valley of the Kings were cut out of the living rock and could not be moved. But there were a few tombs of lesser pharaohs, regents, and viziers, built higher up in the valley out of blocks of cut limestone. And it was one of these-the Tomb of Senef, vizier and regent to Thutmosis IV-that Cahors decided to disassemble and take back to France. It was an audacious and even dangerous engineering feat, since the blocks weighed several tons each and had to be individually lowered down a two-hundred-foot cliff in order to be carted to the Nile and floated downstream.

  The project was plagued with disaster from the beginning. The locals refused to work on the tomb, believing it to be cursed, and so Cahors dragooned a group of French soldiers to undertake the job. The first calamity struck when the inner tomb-which had been resealed in antiquity after the tomb was robbed-was broached. Nine men died almost immediately. Later, it was hypothesized that carbon dioxide gas from acid groundwater moving through limestone far below had filled the tomb, causing the asphyxiation of the three soldiers who first entered, along with the half-dozen others sent in to rescue them.

  But Cahors was singularly determined, and the tomb was eventually taken apart, block by numbered block, and barged down the Nile to the Bay of Aboukir, where it was laid out on the desert sands in a vast array, awaiting transport to France.

  The famous Battle of the Nile ended those plans. After Admiral Horatio Nelson met Napoleon’s gr
and flotilla-and soundly defeated it-in the most decisive naval battle in history, Napoleon fled in a small ship, leaving his armies cut off. Those armies soon capitulated, and in the terms of surrender, the British appropriated their fabulous collections of Egyptian antiquities, including the Rosetta stone-and the Tomb of Senef. A day after the signing of the terms of capitulation, Cahors stabbed himself in the heart with his sword while kneeling amid the stacks of blocks on the sands of Aboukir. And yet his fame as the first Egyptologist lived on, and it was a descendant of this same Cahors who was bankrolling the museum’s reopening of the tomb, à la distance.

  Nora put the first sheaf of documents aside and picked up the second. A Scottish officer with the Royal Navy, Captain Alisdair William Arthur Cumyn, later Baron of Rattray, managed to acquire the Tomb of Senef in a murky transaction that appeared to involve a card game and two prostitutes. Baron Rattray had the tomb transported and reassembled on his ancestral estate in the Highlands of Scotland, went bankrupt doing so, and was forced to sell off most of his ancestral lands. The Barons of Rattray limped along until the mid-nineteenth century, when the last of the line, in a desperate bid to save what was left of the estate, sold the tomb to the American railroad magnate William C. Spragg. One of the museum’s early benefactors, Spragg shipped the tomb across the Atlantic and had it reassembled in the museum, which was under construction at that time. It was his pet project and he spent months haunting the site, hounding the workers, and otherwise making a nuisance of himself. In a tragic irony, he was crushed under the wheels of a horse-drawn ambulance just two days before the grand opening in 1872.

  Nora took a break from her perusal of the documents. It was not quite three o’clock, and she was making better progress than she’d expected. If she could get this done by eight, she might have time to share a quick bite with Bill at the Bones. He would love this dark, dusty history. And it might make a good piece for the Times’s cultural or metropolitan section when the tomb’s opening neared.

  She moved along to the next bundle, all museum documents and in much better condition. The first set of papers dealt with the opening of the tomb. In it were some copies of the engraved invitation:

  The President of the United States of America

  the Honorable General Ulysses S. Grant

  The Governor of the State of New York the Honorable John T. Hoffman

  The President of the New York Museum of Natural History

  Dr. James K. Moreton

  The Trustees and the Director of the Museum

  Cordially invite you to a Dinner and Ball in honor of the opening of the

  GRAND TOMB OF SENEF

  Regent and Vizier to the Pharaoh Thutmosis IV,

  Ruler of Ancient Egypt

  1419-1386 B.C.

  The Diva Eleonora de Graff Bolkonsky will perform Arias

  from the New and Celebrated Opera Aïda

  by Giuseppe Verdi

  Egyptian Costume

  Nora held the crumbling invitation in her hand. It amazed her that the museum commanded such a presence in those days that the president himself signed the invitation. She shuffled further and discovered a second document-a menu for the dinner.

  Hors d’oeuvres Variés

  Consommé Olga

  Kebab Egyptien

  Filet Mignon Lili

  Vegetable Marrow Farcie

  Roast Squab amp; Cress

  Pâté de Foie Gras en Croûte

  Baba Ghanouj

  Waldorf Pudding

  Peaches in Chartreuse Jelly

  There were a dozen blank invitations in the file. She set one aside, along with the menu, in a “to be photocopied” folder. This was something Menzies should see. In fact, she thought, it would be marvelous if they could duplicate the original opening-without the costume ball, perhaps-and offer the same menu.

  She began reading the press notices of the evening. It had been one of those great social events of late-nineteenth-century New York, the likes of which would never be seen again. The guest list read like a roll call at the dawn of the Gilded Age: the Astors and Vanderbilts, William Butler Duncan, Walter Langdon, Ward McAllister, Royal Phelps. There were engravings from Harper’s Weekly showing the ball, with everyone dressed in the most outlandish interpretations of Egyptian costume…

  But she was wasting time. She pushed the clippings aside and opened the next folder. It also contained a newspaper clipping, this time from the New York Sun, one of the scandal sheets of the time. It had an illustration of a dark-haired man in a fez, with liquid eyes, dressed in flowing robes. Quickly she scanned the article.

  Sun Exclusive

  Tomb in New York Museum Is Accursed!

  Egyptian Bey Issues Warning

  The Malediction of the Eye of Horus

  New York-On a recent visit to New York by His Eminence Abdul El-Mizar, Bey of Bolbassa in Upper Egypt, the gentleman from the land of the pharaohs was shocked to find on display at the New York Museum the Tomb of SENEF.

  The Egyptian and his entourage, who were being given a tour of the museum, turned away from the tomb in horror and consternation, warning other visitors that to enter the tomb was to consign oneself to certain and terrible death. “This tomb carries a curse well known in my own country,” El-Mizar later told the Sun.

  Nora smiled. The article went on in the same vein, mingling a stew of dire threats with wildly inaccurate historical pronouncements, ending, naturally, with a “demand” by the alleged “Bey of Bolbassa” that the tomb be returned forthwith to Egypt. At the conclusion, almost as an afterthought, a museum official was quoted as saying that several thousand visitors entered the tomb every day and that there had never been an “untoward incident.”

  This article was followed by a flurry of letters from various people, many of them clearly cranks, describing “sensations” and “presences” they had experienced while in the tomb. Several complained of sickness after visiting: shortness of breath, sweats, palpitations, nervous disorders. One, which merited a file all its own, told of a child who fell into the well and broke both his legs, one of which had to be amputated. An exchange of letters from lawyers resulted in a quiet settlement with the family for a sum of two hundred dollars.

  She moved to the next file, which was very slender, and opened it, surprised to find inside a single yellowed piece of cardboard with a label pasted on it:

  Contents moved to Secure Storage

  March 22, 1938

  Signed: Lucien P. Strawbridge

  Curator of Egyptology

  Nora turned this card over in surprise. Secure Storage? That must be what was now known as the Secure Area, where the museum kept its most valuable artifacts. What inside this file could have merited being locked away?

  She replaced the piece of cardboard and put the file aside, making a mental note to follow up on this later. There was just one final bundle to go. Unsealing it, Nora found it to be full of correspondence and notes on the building of the pedestrian tunnel connecting the IND line subway station to the museum.

  The correspondence was voluminous. As Nora read through it, she began to realize that the story the museum told-that the tomb had been sealed off because of the construction of the tunnel-was not exactly true. The truth, in fact, was just the opposite: the city wanted to route the pedestrian walkway from the front of the station well past the entrance of the tomb-a quicker and cheaper alternative. But for some reason, the museum wished to situate the tunnel toward the far end of the station. Then they argued that the new route would cut off the tomb’s entrance and force its closure. It seemed as if the museum wanted to force the closure of the tomb.

  She read on. Toward the end of the file, she found a handwritten note, from the same Lucien P. Strawbridge who’d placed the earlier file in Secure Storage, scribbled on a memo from a New York City official asking why the museum wanted the pedestrian walkway in that particular location, given the extra costs involved.

  The marginalia read:

  Tell him anything
. I want that tomb closed. Let us not miss our last, best chance to rid ourselves of this damnable problem.

  L. P. Strawbridge

  Damnable problem? Nora wondered just what kind of problem Strawbridge was referring to. She flipped through the file again, but there didn’t seem to be a problem connected with the tomb, beyond the annoyance of the Bey of Bolbassa’s comments and the crank letters they had generated.

  The problem, she decided, must be in the file in Secure Storage. In the end, it didn’t seem relevant, and she had run out of time. When she had time, she might look into it. As it was, if she didn’t get started on her report, she’d never make dinner with Bill.

  She pulled her laptop toward her, opened a new file, and began typing.

  Chapter 15

  The following day, Captain of Homicide Laura Hayward showed her ID and was deferentially ushered into the office of Jack Manetti, head of security for the New York Museum of Natural History. Hayward liked the fact that, in a museum where the administration seemed overly concerned with status, the head of security had chosen for himself a small, windowless office in the back of the security pool, and had furnished it with utterly functional metal desks and chairs. It said something positive about Manetti-at least she hoped it did.

  Manetti was clearly not happy to see her, but he made an attempt at courtesy, offering her a chair and a cup of coffee, which she declined.

  “I’m here on the Green assault,” she said. “I wonder if you’d be willing to accompany me to the Sacred Images show so we can run through a few additional questions I have about ingress and egress, access, security.”

  “But we’ve been all over that, weeks ago. I thought the investigation was complete.”

  “My investigation isn’t complete yet, Mr. Manetti.”

  Manetti licked his lips. “Did you go through the office of the director? We’re supposed to coordinate all law enforcement-”

  She cut him off and stood up, growing irritated. “I don’t have the time, and neither do you. Let’s go.”