Still As Death (4 page)

It wasn’t that the new people weren’t nice. In fact, Sweeney had had a pleasant conversation with them a couple of weeks before, during which the wife had promised to invite Sweeney and Ian over for dinner. But Sweeney hadn’t felt like investing much time in the relationship since she knew she wouldn’t be on Russell Street much longer. Her landlord had told her he was selling the building. She’d sold some of her father’s paintings the previous winter, and the proceeds
had swelled her bank account beyond any hope she’d ever had for it. She had thought briefly about buying the dilapidated triple-decker, but it was much more than she needed and she didn’t really want to go into the rental business. Her landlord had said he was hoping to sell by the end of the year, but she’d avoided thinking about it too much.

And she’d avoided telling Ian about the conversation. When he’d first arrived in Boston, he’d taken a room at a hotel for the first few weeks, but it hadn’t been long before he’d moved into Sweeney’s apartment. She had found the whole idea of it somehow amusing: Urbane, English Ian, living in her shabby apartment with its noisy pipes and creaking floorboards. He claimed not to mind, but it had been only a month or two before he’d started dropping hints about the lack of closet space and bugging her about looking for a bigger place. Sweeney had chosen avoidance, changing the subject and trying just to go on as they were, ignoring the fact that Ian had planned to be in Boston for six months and he was now coming up on the eighth. He flew to Paris once a month to see his daughter, but Sweeney knew it bothered him being so far away.

As she climbed the stairs to her apartment, however, she felt a little wave of pleasure at the thought that he was there, waiting for her. She smelled something delicious as she opened the door and was greeted by the sight of her boyfriend—for lack of a better word—lighting a candle at her already-set dining room table.

“Hey,” he said. “Steaks are almost done.”

“Steaks? Mmmm.” She dropped her bag in her office, stopped in the bathroom to splash cold water on her face, and went through to the kitchen, where Ian now had his head stuck out the window, checking the steaks on Sweeney’s fire escape hibachi. She could smell them cooking, could smell something tangy and salty, probably his famous teriyaki-ginger marinade. He ducked back in and she hugged him from behind. “I could get used to this.”

As soon as she’d said it, she wished she hadn’t. She couldn’t see
the expression on his face, but his voice was amused as it said, “That’s the point.”

She pulled away and found two wineglasses, then filled them from the bottle of red on the table. “The General around?”

Ian took his glass. “He made an appearance when he smelled the steaks, but when he realized I wasn’t going to give him any, he returned to his nightly perambulations.”

“His nightly perambulations?”

“There’s something about that animal that has me using words like ‘perambulations’.”

Sweeney smiled. Ian, who had grown up with dogs, didn’t much like cats, but he’d been very understanding about the General. The cat had been rude after Ian moved in, carrying his socks into the bathroom and dropping them in puddles of water from the shower, and leaving mouse entrails in his perfectly polished shoes. Sweeney had tried to convince Ian that the mouse parts were proud offerings, but she knew as well as he did that it was an act of hostility.

“Good day?” he asked as they tucked into the steaks.

She swallowed. “Fruitful, anyway. I figured out where we’re going to place most of the postmortem photographs. And the catalog looks great. I think it’s coming together finally.” She washed a piece of tender meat down with a swallow of red wine. “Oh, hey. What do you know about the UNESCO convention? Something like that. It’s meant to stop people bringing Egyptian antiquities out of the country.”

“Not just Egypt. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s 1970 Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property. It’s a mouthful, I know, but it basically said that member countries could take back illegally acquired antiquities if they could prove they’d been stolen. It was a really dreadful state of affairs, people bringing vases and things home in their suitcases. They realized they had to do something or Egypt was
going to lose its entire cultural heritage. What there was left of it, of course. Why do you ask?”

“I told you Willem and I want to round out the Egyptian part of the exhibition with another piece of jewelry, right?” He nodded. “Well, I found the perfect piece today. It’s in the museum’s permanent collection but it isn’t displayed right now. I can’t imagine why because it looks fabulous in the picture, but anyway, there were all these documents showing everyone who had owned it.”

Ian took a long sip of his wine and sat back in his chair. “There have been some high-profile cases recently of collectors who created fake documentation in order to pass off a stolen piece as legitimate. What you’d have to do is create a paper trail showing that the piece was excavated and legally acquired before 1970. There was a dealer in New York, someone I knew pretty well, good reputation and all that, who got indicted a couple of years ago for trafficking in stolen antiquities. Apparently he was knowingly buying statues from a British collector who had bought them on the black market in Egypt. They’d cooked up this whole thing where they said the statues were part of the collection of some earl who was an explorer. They forged documents and stained them with tea to make them look old. That kind of thing.”

“I guess the stakes are high enough that it would be worth going through all that.”

“Oh, yes. There was one piece, the head of a king, I believe, that was worth more than a million dollars.”

Sweeney whistled.

“That’s right. Would you like some ice cream?” He got up to clear their plates.

“Of course I would.” She stood up halfheartedly to help him.

“Uh-uh. Sit. I’ll do it.” She did, gratefully.

“So how’s the exhibition coming along, anyway,” Ian asked once they’d finished their butter pecan and he’d told her about his day.

“Fine. I’ve got a lot to do still, but the catalog looks great and the Egyptian stuff is all ready to go now. Everything—or nearly
everything—is framed at this point and I’m going to start some of the wall label text tomorrow. We open September tenth, so I need to get moving on it.” She looked up at him. He was going to Paris on September 10. “Oh, no, I forgot you’re going to Paris. You’re going to miss the opening.”

He looked away quickly, then said dismissively, “Well, I might be able to change it. We’ll see.” He cleared his throat and stood up, taking their ice cream dishes into the kitchen. “I talked to Peter today,” he called back. Peter was Ian’s partner in London.

“Yeah?”

“He thinks we need to figure out whether I’m coming back to London or not. The Boston office is doing very well, but he’s feeling shorthanded over there.”

“Oh.” Sweeney poured herself another glass of wine, finishing the bottle.

“Sweeney.” He came back into the room and sat down across from her. “We need to talk about this.” His glasses made his eyes look a little bigger than they actually were, and in the candlelight she felt intensely scrutinized.

“Well, do you want to stay? What do you want to do? I mean, couldn’t they hire someone in London to take over for you? Or if you want to go back, you could …” She was babbling, looking everywhere but at him.

“I would love to stay, but I can’t. You know how hard it’s been being apart from Eloise so much. I hate seeing her just once a month.”

“So, what? You’re just going to go back?” Suddenly she realized she didn’t like the idea of that, either.

He reached across the table and took her hands. “No, I’m not going to just go back. I want you to go back with me.”

She couldn’t look at him. “But what about my work? What about my apartment? What about the General?”

“I have a lot of contacts at universities back home. So do you, for that matter. You could commute to Oxford a couple of days a week. There are universities in London, you know. And I have a very large
house. You could have an office. I don’t know how it works with animals. There might be a quarantine or something, but the General can come too, if he’s allowed.”

She took a too-fast sip of her wine, sputtering and dribbling it on her blouse. She dabbed at the linen with a napkin and said, “I don’t … I don’t know. I don’t want you to go back. But I haven’t been here very long. I don’t know if I could …”

“Is it London?”

She took a deep breath and considered. Was it London? Ian knew she hadn’t been back since her fiancé had died in a terrorist bombing there three years before. She didn’t say anything.

“So it’s me.”

“It’s not. It’s just … it’s a big move. I don’t know if I could just pick up and …” As she said the words, she felt the weight of everything she’d have to move, the secondhand couch she loved, her framed photographs of gravestones, the leather club chair that had belonged to her father and that her aunt Anna had given her. And then she felt the weight of everything she’d be leaving behind: her best friend, Toby, the university, her favorite bakery and pub and Chinese place. This was home.

“Sweeney, I know it’s a big move, but I don’t know what alternative we have. If we want to be together …?” It was a good question and one she didn’t know how to answer.

“I know. I’m sorry.” She took another long sip of her wine and felt better. There was time. He wasn’t asking her to make a decision right now, was he? She reached out and took his hands. “We do want to be together. Of course we do.” She was very conscious that she hadn’t used “I.” “You know that.”

There was something sad and scared in his face as he dropped her hands. “Just think about it, okay? That’s all I’m asking you to do.”

WILLEM KEANE POURED TWO GLASSES of bourbon from the bottle on his desk and handed one to the man sitting across from him. “To the canopic chest,” he said, raising his glass. He had to stop himself from grinning like a little kid. Cyrus Hutchinson was a stern, serious man, but he was very proud of his gift and Willem knew he needed to strike a perfect balance between excitement and professional decorum.

“To the canopic chest,” said Hutchinson, with an elegant little gesture that matched Willem’s. They each took a long sip and studied each other with mutual respect and a little bit of suspicion.

“Really, Hutch, we truly appreciate this gift to the museum. I hope you know what a meaningful thing you’ve done for generations of students and faculty. It’s a stunning piece. It really is.” Willem turned to the chest sitting on the table in a corner of his office. In the low, green-tinged light from his desk lamp, the rich alabaster glowed like milk suspended in the air. The eighteenth-dynasty chest was rectangular, about the size of a small suitcase, with four compartments that once contained the internal organs of a young Egyptian king. The spaces where the liver, lungs, stomach, and intestines had rested were topped by alabaster stoppers in the form of the heads of the
deities Imsety, Hapy, Duamutef, and Qebehsenuef, a human, a baboon, a jackal, and a falcon. He felt a sudden surge of something like arousal, a speeding of his blood, and forced himself to calm down. It was always amazing to him that he could get so jazzed up about a new acquisition.

“Well, I’m very happy to do it,” Hutchinson said, nodding his head, his long, droopy face and white eyebrows holding a bit of worry. “How long do you think it will be before you can complete the new exhibit?”

“We should be able to do the necessary work over the Christmas holidays. Perhaps we can have an official unveiling in January? We want to make sure that the university community, and of course the public, knows what a wonderful thing you and Susanna have done.” Hutchinson lit up at that. He was, Willem thought, an essentially ego-driven man. In fact, his formidable ego was what Willem had used to get him to part with the canopic chest. He had begun courting the old man three years ago, seeking him out at an alumni event and then writing him a sickeningly sycophantic note about how much he would like to see the family collection of Egyptian antiquities. Hutchinson was the American grandson of a British explorer who had plundered sites in the Valley of the Kings for years before he died of a massive coronary in the arms of his Egyptian mistress in a Cairo hotel. His booty was housed in a number of museums, but an unknown number of pieces had remained in the family, a fact that had given Willem a small charge of illicit pleasure when he’d learned it.

He had seduced Hutchinson, he saw now, grooming him for the final outcome by making sure not to rush things, by giving the man time to come up on his own with the idea of a gift to the museum. By the time he’d suggested the gift of a small statue from his grandfather’s collection, Willem had anticipated his move and was ready with his argument that the statue would disappear into the museum’s other holdings, whereas something like a canopic chest, for example, would stand out. Perhaps they could even build a special
exhibit for it …? Something with a plaque indicating that it had been gifted to the museum by a famous and valued alumnus …? Hutchinson hadn’t known what hit him.

“Of course, we’d love to show it off even before the new exhibit’s done,” Willem said now. “We’re having an opening in a couple of weeks. A young woman from the History of Art Department is curating an exhibit of funerary art from various times and places. She’s chosen a number of pieces from the museum’s collection. I hope you’ll come up from New York and be our guest.”

The door opened and Tad Moran came in holding three copies of the transfer papers. Willem met his eyes and indicated that he should put them down on the desk. He didn’t want to rush Hutchinson, didn’t want him to feel ambushed. Tad, who had been working for Willem for so long that he was able to read something as subtle as the tiny nod of a head toward the desk, smiled and put them down.

“Have you met my right-hand man, Hutch?” Willem asked. “This is Tad Moran, our assistant director here.”