Still As Death

STILL
AS DEATH

ALSO BY SARAH STEWART TAYLOR

Judgment of the Grave
Mansions of the Dead
O’ Artful Death

SARAH STEWART TAYLOR

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

STILL AS DEATH
. Copyright © 2006 by Sarah Stewart Taylor. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.minotaurbooks.com

ISBN-13: 978-0-312-33742-1
ISBN-10: 0-312-33742-6

First Edition: September 2006

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

F
OR
L
YNN
W
HITTAKER

Most readers will realize that the Hapner Museum is an entirely fictional creation. Still, I am very grateful to Bart Thurber, curator of European Art at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, for showing me around a
real
college art museum and answering my many questions. Any mistakes or deviations from reality for the purposes of plot are mine and mine alone. Information available from Steven R. Keller and Associates and the Museum, Library and Cultural Property Protection Committee, American Society for Industrial Security was invaluable for my research into museum security.

I found a number of books helpful in my research into Egyptian burial items:
Jewels of the Pharaohs
by Cyril Aldred;
Howard Carter Before Tutankhamun
by Nicholas Reeves and John H. Taylor;
Ancient Egypt: Treasures from the Collection of the Oriental Institute University of Chicago
by Emily Teeter;
The Complete Valley of the Kings
by Nicholas Reeves and Richard H. Wilkinson;
The British Museum Book of Ancient Egypt
edited by Stephen Quirke and Jeffrey Spencer;
The World of the Pharaohs
by Christine Hobson;
Tutankhamun: His Tomb and Its Treasures
by I. E. S. Edwards;
The Complete Tutankhamun
by Nicholas Reeves; and
Official Catalogue, The Egyptian Museum Cairo
by Mohamed Saleh and Hourig Sourouzian.

Finally, a huge thanks to Ryan Quinn at St. Martin’s Minotaur and most of all to my editor, Kelley Ragland, for her patience and understanding during an intense time. I have been so lucky to work with
Lynn Whittaker over the past few years. She is a great agent and a great friend. And a big thank-you to my family, especially to Susan and David Taylor for grandparenting beyond the call of duty, to Matt Dunne for his love and support, and, of course, to Judson Dunne.

STILL AS DEATH

1979

THE ROOM WAS SILENT as a crypt.

Karen Philips laid the jewelry out on her worktable and reflected on the aptness of the metaphor. The items spread out before her had, of course, come from crypts or, more accurately, tombs of ancient Egyptians who had been well outfitted for their passage to the afterlife. Under the bright fluorescent bulbs, the faience, glass, and metal amulets, the beaded necklaces and collars lost some of their appeal. But she knew that they would look beautiful in a display cabinet, their colors revealed under perfect, golden light.

She felt a little charge of excitement. She had seen wonderful pieces of gold and bead jewelry in Cairo and in New York and in Washington, DC, but this was the first time she had actually handled jewelry from an ancient Egyptian tomb. The collection was part of a recent donation to the university museum made by a wealthy alumnus with an interest in Egyptian antiquities, and everyone, including Karen, was riding the wave of excitement generated by the announcement.

The donation was the result of a carefully planned friendship between Willem Keane, the museum’s curator of ancient Egyptian art, and Arthur Maloof, a financier with a huge personal fortune. Willem
had convinced him to hand over a number of items from his excellent collections, and he was most excited about the donation of a stunning sheet-gold mummy mask that would make the museum’s collection of antiquities the envy of most museums in the world. Because of laws forbidding antiquities from leaving Egypt, it was rare that important pieces like the mask came on the market anymore, Karen knew.

There were some other items of interest in the Maloof collection: canopic jars that had held the organs of a mummified king, game boxes, and a large number of little shabti figures that had acted as stand-ins for the dead in the next world, meant to do any work they might be called on to do. The jewelry had been kind of an afterthought. There weren’t any especially rare or valuable pieces in the cache, and she assumed that Maloof wasn’t interested in storing them anymore and had decided to let Willem have them along with the mask.

Willem hadn’t been particularly excited about the jewelry, but when Karen had asked him if she could inspect it, he’d readily agreed. She was writing her thesis on women’s funeral jewelry and thought she might find some additional material among the new acquisitions. In any case, she was probably the first scholar to really study them, and that gave her a little thrill.

She looked over the files to get some background before inspecting the pieces themselves. First was a series of little amulets in the shapes of animals and deities that had held various meanings for the ancient Egyptians. There were a huge number of scarabs and eyes of Horus, a few crocodiles, vultures, and baboons. The little charms had likely been found among the linen wrappings on a mummy, meant to protect the dead in the tomb. The amulets were common and Karen had seen them before. There was no need to pay them much attention. Next was a series of simple bracelets and necklaces made of gold and glass beads. She was able to date them pretty reliably to the New Kingdom, and she took some notes before moving on to the last piece, a beaded falcon collar featuring rows of gold and
faience beads interspersed with amulets of many different kinds of stones. The falcon heads at either end of the thick necklace were made of gold, with accents of lapis and carnelian.

Karen sat up a little straighter in her chair. It was a beautiful collar and she hadn’t expected to find it. The file on it said it was eighteenth dynasty, from a tomb in Giza, but she didn’t think that could be right. It looked vaguely familiar to her. Not the necklace itself, but the style. She jotted some notes on a piece of paper and was about to go back to the files when she started at the sound of voices out in the basement gallery. It was against security regulations, but she had left the door to the study room propped open just a bit to let in some fresh air. She couldn’t hear what they were saying, but she assumed they were looking at the displays of Egyptian antiquities, Willem’s two sarcophagi and the exhibits of statuary and other items from the collection.

She turned back to the collar, knowing she was lucky that Willem had given her access to it before he’d even had a chance to look through the pieces himself. She was very, very fortunate.
Don’t forget it, Karen. Don’t let yourself forget how lucky you are.

Willem’s recommendation would look good when she applied to graduate school, and experience with the jewelry would be helpful if she became a curator.
When
, she reminded herself, remembering what the speaker at the last meeting of the campus women’s group had said about undermining one’s own possibilities.
When
she became a curator.

She sifted through the papers in the file folder, trying to find a document that mentioned the beaded collar. According to the paperwork, the jewelry had been excavated in the Valley of the Kings in 1930 on a dig sponsored by a British collector named Harold Markham. The Markham collection was well-known, and much of it had gone to places like the Metropolitan Museum and the British Museum, so that was in order.

But she couldn’t shake the feeling that the collar wasn’t eighteenth dynasty. In any case, it was so well preserved it was hard to believe
that it was three thousand years old. It was what she loved about Egyptology, the vibrancy of the works of art, the way they seemed so relevant, so modern so many years later. What it must have been like to be one of the first archaeologists to uncover the entrance to a king’s tomb, to stand there under the hot Egyptian sun, to hear the men shout suddenly that they had found something, a staircase! She had relived Howard Carter’s discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamen so many times that she almost felt as though she’d been there.

Ever since she had seen the Tutankhamen exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum in New York on a school trip four years ago, she had known that this was what she wanted to do. She had begun learning about Egypt, about the strange burial customs and the cult of the afterlife that had so obsessed the ancient Egyptians. She had loved memorizing the names of the gods and goddesses, the strange-sounding words, and then the hieroglyphs, the code that unlocked the secrets of that ancient world. She had done research into which colleges and universities were the best for studying Egyptology, and then she had decided that she wanted to study here. After that, everything she had done was for the purpose of attaining this goal. It had been easy to keep her grades up, knowing that the prize for doing so was realizing her dream.

After she’d gotten to the university, the dream had become Egypt itself, and during her junior summer, she had finally been able to go, joining a dig at Giza for three months with an expedition from the Hapner Museum that included Willem Keane and some other faculty members, along with a number of graduate students.

She had been disillusioned, of course. There was no way she wouldn’t have been disappointed by the reality of Egypt, the hot, dirty poverty of the cities obscuring the fantasy she’d created, the endless sand and drudgery of work on the dig. She had known enough about archaeology at that point to know that she wanted to be an art historian and not an archaeologist, that it wasn’t all uncovering intact tombs and treasures, but still she’d been surprised that it
had been so different from her expectations. They were digging for tiny pieces of ancient history now, shards and fragments instead of golden statues and alabaster unguent vases, all the things of Karen’s dreams.

It had been a sort of relief to return to the university and the museum, with its lovely pieces of antiquity, already cleaned of dust and dirt and grime, already in place behind glass. But then she’d realized that the darkness she’d found in Egypt had followed her home.

It was while she was away that she’d begun to question whether those beautiful things should be behind glass in an American museum at all. A young Egyptian graduate student working on the dig had told her that Egypt’s history had been looted by rich white men, nothing more than “pirates,” who had stolen his country’s most valuable assets, leaving nothing behind but empty graves. “Why is it?” he asked, “that I should have to come to America or Britain to see the art of my own country? You Americans wouldn’t stand for it. You’d buy it back or find a way to take it, just as you take everything you want. The white men are nothing more than rapists, taking what they wanted by force when they couldn’t seduce my countrymen into giving it willingly.”

Since coming home, she’d been different too. It was as though she’d awakened from a fog, she thought. She saw things so differently now. Everything she’d once taken for granted was now as uncertain as the history of the beaded collar.

As she was putting the collar into its box, she heard the voices again out in the gallery. This time, there was something about them that made her pay attention, something about the urgent low tones of the two men who seemed to be arguing.

“You’re not doing it right,” she heard one say. “Like this.”
Museumgoers
, she told herself.
Looking for the sarcophagi
. And then there was a loud crack from outside the door, a violent sound, and then another one. She jumped up, surprised, overturning the metal stool she’d been sitting on, and she heard one of the voices say, “What the fuck?” and then the men were at the door, two of them, dressed in
raincoats and carrying hatchets. She saw the hatchets before she took in the details of their plain, almost pleasant faces, and she must have screamed because the shorter of the men yelled, “Shut up!” and crossed the room to her, clapping a hand over her mouth and pushing her to the ground, grinding her face into the musty-smelling industrial carpet that lined the floor of the study room. Sitting on her back, he twisted her arm behind her. Her shoulder throbbed. She struggled to breathe against the carpet, gasping and choking and tasted stomach acid in her mouth.