The Bone Vault - Linda Fairstein (16 page)

"About these psychological reactions?"

"Not really. My main concern was her physical condition."

Mercer put down his pen and we all focused on Bellinger. "What do you mean?"

"From the time she disclosed the rape to me in August, I began to keep an eye out for her. When I knew she was going to be working late, I sent her home in a car. If I noticed she wasn't eating, I'd bring an extra sandwich for lunch. By midfall, I'd certainly say by October, I didn't think she looked very well at all."

"Did you speak with her about it?"

"I don't know about your office, Ms. Cooper, but we've got pretty strict institutional guidelines about sexual harassment. Puts a supervisor in kind of a catch-22 position. `You're not looking very well today, Katrina. Seems to me like you've dropped a few pounds. That old spark I used to see fly when we discussed the one-point-three-million-dollar purchase we expected the museum to make on a tapestry from Bordeaux, it just isn't there in your eyes anymore.' Uh-uh. Only gets a guy in trouble. I talked it over with my wife and she told me it was none of my business. Leave it alone."

"Did you tell anyone else?" "Sure. Pierre Thibodaux. He's the boss. I put it right in his lap. I told him I thought one of our rising stars had a problem and needed our help if we were going to hang on to her."

"What did he do?"

"Nothing. Nothing at all. You know what his response was? When I told him that she had been raped leaving work a few months earlier, he told me to forget about our telephone conversation. He told me that he wanted me to destroy any records I was keeping about the fact that she had been assaulted."

"What?" Chapman asked.

I whispered to Mercer the same word that Bellinger spoke aloud: "Lawsuit. All he was concerned about was the museum's potential liability. `Pierre,' I said, `this girl is suffering. There's something seriously wrong with her, and someone here needs to intervene.' He refused to deal with that aspect of it. It's all about money to him, all the time. He kept insisting that Katrina was probably setting up a case to sue the museum."

"I don't get it," Mike said, looking at me.

"Sure you do. Cloisters employee working late, probably to make a deadline for a research project or exhibition." Bellinger nodded in agreement as I talked. "Leaves the museum alone and is attacked, still on the grounds. No one is ever caught or charged with the crime. Victim suffers from generic psychological ailment. Maybe she's going to feel better some day, after lots of expensive therapy. Maybe she's not. Museum dangles half a million dollars in front of her nose to keep her quiet. Don't scare the tourists, don't upset the coworkers."

"Did Thibodaux know the girl you were talking about was Katrina Grooten? I mean, did you mention her name?" Mike was clearly drawn back to the reaction when he had shown her photograph to the director, who claimed not to recognize her.

Bellinger thought for a few moments. "I'm not sure whether I did. Pierre had met her a couple of times. But that would have been at group meetings or large social occasions. I'm not sure I thought he would have known her. It shouldn't have mattered who she was, frankly, once I brought the gravity of this to his attention."

"Anyone else you told?"

"Yes. I tried two of the women next. Thought that might strike a responsive chord with the sisterhood." Bellinger shook his head as he spoke. "They both knew her from the planning sessions for the big exhibit. Eve Drexler, who's Thibodaux's assistant, and Anna Friedrichs, who's the curator in one of the other departments at the Met."

"Yes, we saw both of them yesterday. How did they react?"

"I was foolish to think that Eve would do anything to cross Thibodaux. She listened to everything I told her and asked me to keep her informed. But she basically advised me not to worry about it. It was just a `woman's problem' and Katrina would get over it."

"And Anna?"

"She was good. She's the one who urged me to call the counselor. Anna had noticed the changes, too. She felt the phone call would have more weight coming from me, since Katrina worked directly for me. So I called."

"What did Harriet say?"

"I told her my concern. I described the changes in Katrina since the summer. How she had lost weight and become listless. That lately, she had become apathetic about her work, which was very uncharacteristic of her."

It not only sounded like post�traumatic stress, but also like the beginning of an overlay of arsenic poisoning.

"I asked Harriet whether she thought Katrina should see a physician, whether there was something medically wrong that might be causing this deterioration. You haven't told me how Katrina died, of course," Bellinger said, looking at Mike, "so perhaps my secondguessing is all irrelevant."

Mike didn't offer any assistance. "What did she say?" "Harriet? That she could handle this herself. That counseling like this was her specialty. She had only been seeing Katrina since late summer, so the differences were not as startling to her as they were to some of us who had known her before she was assaulted. But she led me to believe that she was the expert, so I left it alone. Harriet told me all the symptoms I mentioned were consistent with rape trauma syndrome."

"Did you and Katrina continue to talk about it, too?"

"Not really. By the beginning of November, she was already hinting to me that she was thinking about going home, to Cape Town. Her father was there--"

"Do you have a telephone number for him?"

"It's in the personnel folder here. I don't think it will do you much good. She told me her father was in a nursing home. Early-onset Alzheimer's, if I'm not mistaken. I told her I thought it was crazy for her to go back there, for two reasons."

"What were they?"

"I thought she needed to get well before she went home. Brought out that stubborn streak she had. She got all fired up about the medical care in South Africa and how advanced it was. That if there was something psychological impeding her recovery, it would do her good to get out of this environment, where the rape occurred. And that if it was medical as I suspected-- and she doubted that, by the way, because she placed such faith in Harriet--then the best doctors in the world were in Cape Town."

"And your second reason for thinking she shouldn't leave?"

"The work she was doing."

"They don't have tombs in Africa?" Mike asked. "They don't have museums?"

"Of course they do. But nothing like her specialty. She had already applied for a job. I'd written a letter of recommendation, which you'll also see in the file."

"For what kind of position?"

"The McGregor Museum. It's in Kimberley, South Africa."

"They've got a medieval art department?" I asked.

"Botany. Archaeology. Cultural history. Zoology. Natural history. Science, not medieval art. They're what you do at the McGregor. That was my point, Ms. Cooper. Katrina was such a promising student in this highly competitive field. But all of the medieval studies programs are limited to the European and American institutions. She was throwing away ten years of her education."

"But it was her home, Mr. Bellinger." "Her mother was dead. Her father didn't know her any longer. She'd gone to university in England, so her friends were scattered all over the world.That wasn't home, in South Africa. She was beginning to make herself a decent life here." Bellinger was pacing now and was getting more agitated as he spoke about his efforts to stop Katrina from leaving New York. "Anna Friedrichs and I were hoping to restore her health and well-being. I'd talked to Eve about letting her transfer her work to the main branch of the Met so she didn't have to deal with coming through Fort Tryon Park every day."

"Sounds like you wanted to keep her around," Mike said.

"Very much so. I even suggested a leave of absence. Go home for the holidays. Visit her father. See that there was nothing left for her in Cape Town. Now I can only imagine the pressure she was experiencing if someone here was trying to kill her all that time."

Bellinger hesitated, then looked across his desk to Mike and Mercer. "Are you going to tell me? Am I entitled to know how she died?"

"Poison, most probably."

He pulled out his chair and sat down, throwing his head back and studying a gargoyle in the arch of the ceiling. The last thing I expected to hear him do was laugh.

"I hope to hell it wasn't arsenic. I've got enough of it here to do in all of us."

14

"Do you mean that Katrina Grooten worked with arsenic here at the Cloisters?"

Bellinger fidgeted now, swiveling in his chair as though he were looking for something north of the heavy traffic crawling across the George Washington Bridge.

"No, no, I can't say that she did."

"But a lot of the other staff members do?" Chapman asked.

He thought before answering. "I wouldn't say very many. Four at the most. Those who work under my direct supervision. They'll all tell youI'm the one who uses it most."

"Why? In what form?"

"My particular scholarship is in the field of illustrated manuscripts." He stood up and walked to some of the open volumes that had been moved to accommodate our gathering. "From the earliest monastic houses on, the production of books was an essential task the monks performed for the greater ecclesiastical community. Each of them had what was called a scriptorium, where scribes and illuminators copied classical texts. Here, in the building we call the Treasury, we've got a unique collection of these exquisite books."

Bellinger picked one up and carried it back to us. "Certainly our most prized possession. Perhaps you know it. TheBelles Heures. "

"Only from the museum catalog."

"This one was described in the inventory of the Duke of Berry in 1413. These were made by the monks for the rich patrons and royal families, who were supposed to say their prayers at the same canonical hours that were observed in the monasteries--book of hours."

The two pages he displayed were ornately decorated in gold leaf around the text of the prayers. There were stunning paintings in vibrant colors, and I studied the heavy pages before moving out of the way for Mike and Mercer.

"How has this survived in such good condition?" I asked.

"The books always suffered less damage than things like tapestries. They couldn't be melted down into bullion, like jewelry or pieces of gold, so thieves and rogues didn't perceive them to have very much value. It's just that their colors fade over time, and we restore them here. That's the work I like to do."

"And the materials?" "We try to imitate what was done in medieval times." Bellinger pointed at parts of the elegant page. "Powdered gold for these elaborate drawings was made by grinding the actual metal with honey and mixing it with egg whites. Black came from a carbon- based ink. They made blue in a number of ways. The most expensive was actually ground from lapis lazuli, or indigo mixed with white lead--which is actually quite poisonous itself. And yellow, that's where the orpiment comes in. The monks used saffron to produce a yellow pigment in the early days. But it wasn't permanent."

"What's orpiment?"

"It's an arsenic compound, Detective. Very widely used to give us a fine yellow color. You can see how effective it is right on that page you're examining now. In our workshop downstairs, we've got more than enough to make someone quite ill."

"Is it secured?"

"Do we keep it under lock and key? Of course not. Our little restoration area doesn't get a lot of outside interest. It's very intense labor and doesn't excite much of the general public."

"Did Ms. Grooten have access to the room?"

Bellinger paused for a moment. "Certainly. But she wasn't in the habit of licking paintbrushes, Mr. Chapman." He was beginning to snap at Mike. "And Napol�on didn't chew on his wallpaper, either."

"What?" the puzzled curator asked.

"There was arsenic found in locks of Napol�on's hair. Lots of it. There were theories that his captors did him in, and some wild conjecture that he was poisoned by the vapors from the wallpaper color in his room at St. Helena's, during his exile. Copper arsenite."

"Scheele's green, probably. A brilliant pigment. We've got some of that, too. Don't use as much of it because it wasn't created until after the Renaissance, so it wouldn't be authentic to our pieces."

"That's exactly why we need to know what Grooten was working on and who she dealt with," I said. Mike knew more about the great Corsican general than Pat McKinney knew about the law. If he got off on a Napol�onic tangent, we'd be here until midnight. "I assume you have a way to tell us whether any tubes or vials are missing?"

"I'm sure I don't. The workmen get all the supplies they need by ordering from the Met. Ask Pierre Thibodaux. Ask Erik Poste. Ask the other medievalists."

His counterparts at the main branch were obvious interview subjects. "Why Thibodaux? Why Poste?"

"I'm sure the director's office has all the billing records for the goods that are purchased for our needs. The ever-rigid Ms. Drexler must be able to put her fingers on that. There are a host of toxic substances in paints and pigments, varnishes and cleaning agents. And we're not the only ones who restore old artworks, Ms. Cooper. Mr. Poste's European collection has far more extensive restoration projects than do I."

I didn't think he was pointing the finger at other colleagues as much as he was highlighting how frustrating our search would be in an institution that apparently needed poisons to enliven the glorious holdings the public came to view.

"May we have this copy of Ms. Grooten's personnel file to take with us?" I asked.

"I've reproduced the entire thing for you."

I opened it from the back and saw the letter of resignation first. It had been written on a word processor and dated December 24 of the previous year. In place of a signature was the capital letterK, drawn with a marker in almost a stick-figure print.

"Is that how she usually signed things, not spelling out her whole name?"

Bellinger took the document from my hand. "Straight and simple, just like that. She usually used both initials, but herG was more Gothic, if you will." He closed his eyes as if to call up an image of her signature. "TheG would have been harder to imitate, come to think of it, if someone else did the writing." I hadn't suggested that the letter wasn't written by Grooten. "Why would you think she didn't write this herself?"