The Bone Vault - Linda Fairstein (17 page)

"I--uh, I don't know. When did she die? I just mean she never came back to work after the twentieth, if I'm not wrong. Maybe she'd already been murdered, and the killer wrote this so I wouldn't be worried about her disappearance."

"And were you?"

"I was out of town that entire period, visiting my in- laws for the holidays. I never knew Katrina had quit until I returned in January. She was gone, and I thought she had left the country. There wasn't much I could do about it until she sent me a forwarding address, as that letter said she would do once she got set up at home."

"Did she have a computer when she was working here?"

"Yes, of course."

"With an e-mail address?" I could see where Mike was going.

"So far as I know, the only e-mail address Katrina had was through the museum system. You'll see in her file some correspondence that arrived for her after she left for South--" He caught himself. "After she resigned. We bought an entire new computer system, hardware and software, which was installed after the first of the year.

"When they dismantled Katrina's equipment, I authorized the head of our management information systems to go into her account with her password, to make sure that nothing had come in for her that was related to museum business."

"Did they find anything?"

"Minor correspondence, really. There were a few responses to requests for materials from museums overseas. We've got a good number of objects out on loan that she wanted to see photographs of, for their possible inclusion in the bestiary show. I forwarded those to the committee she had been working with. Gaylord, Friedrichs, Poste, and the others."

"Anything personal?"

"Those should be in that packet you're holding. A bunch of Christmas and New Year's greetings from people she knew, here and abroad."

I opened the file from the front this time, to skim through it to find those letters. I was arrested by the photograph of the young woman that appeared on the museum identification tag dated almost three years ago. The contrast to the Polaroid that had been taken the night we found the body was stunning. Grooten had smiled at the camera when she first came to work here, her face fuller and her light brown hair alive with chestnut streaks, as bouncy as a commercial for a home permanent. I twisted the folder and showed the shot to Mercer, who shook his head.

"Something wrong?" Bellinger asked.

"I hadn't seen her before, except the photographs made the night before last. I realize this was taken a few years ago, but is it a pretty good likeness?"

Bellinger reached across and looked at Grooten. "A very good one. Until last fall. That's when she began losing weight and developed that awful pallor."

Mike pulled the more recent picture from his jacket pocket.

Bellinger looked at it and again closed his eyes. "It's not the way I like to think of her, but it's certainly how she began to look by October."

Perhaps Thibodaux hadn't been lying to us. It was hard to imagine the physical transformation this young woman had undergone in the short months before her death.

"How about her apartment?" Mercer asked. "Did you ever check there to see what happened to her belongings?"

"My wife and I went to see the super in--let me think --it must have been the middle of January. When she was ten days late with that month's rent, he called the museum. No one in his small building had seen her in weeks, and my secretary said she had resigned to leave the country. He cleaned out the apartment and rented it again before--"

Mike interrupted. "How about her things? Her belongings?"

"Katrina hadn't accumulated much stuff. He figured she just bolted on her last month's rent. She left no forwarding information, so the super held a tag sale in the building to get rid of what he could, and threw everything else out on the sidewalk."

Mike was thinking about potential evidence. I imagined the possessions of the young woman's life, meager as they were. Family photographs, treasured art books, perhaps an heirloom--a ring or bracelet that had belonged to an ancestor or friend. All discarded or sold for a few weeks of back rent in a cheap tenement building by a landlord who didn't think to question her disappearance.

"This work that Katrina did, with medieval tombs and their sculpture, what was it exactly?" Mike asked. "Did shewant to do that, or did you assign it to her?"

"It was the specialty she chose, Detective."

"Grim, wouldn't you say?"

"Not as grim as your job, Mr. Chapman. That's what most people in my line of work would think. Would you like to see what she was doing here? I can show you on our way out."

Mercer took the Grooten file and we followed Bellinger back to the elevators and downstairs. Clouds were forming above us, casting shadows over the crosswalks in the cloistered garden. As we reentered the building on the far side from the tower, nearly every archway in the arcade seemed covered with fantastic animals.

"She loved those, Ms. Cooper. I'd often see Katrina out here, no matter how cold or wet the day, sketching these odd beasts." He saw me slow my step to look up at the stone menagerie. "That's a manticore--a man's face, lion's body, and a scorpion's tail. Quite a combination, eh? And she'd had a cast made of that pelican, to use in the big exhibit. It pierces its own breast so that its blood, falling on its dead brood, can bring them back to life."

We walked behind him into a two-story building at the southwest corner of the museum property. Mike whispered to me, "It looks like a stone deadhouse."

I shivered at the sound of the words, an old name for a morguelike place where bodies are stored, and shuddered again at the cold interior of the Gothic chapel. Everywhere I looked, against each wall and in the middle of the room, were funereal monuments.

Bellinger clearly felt at home. "By the eleventh century, it had become quite fashionable in Europe for noblemen to commemorate themselves and their families with carved effigies. These tomb sculptures are what Katrina studied, back in France. Famous masons of the time would plan and execute these, including details of the patron's coat of arms and the particular costumes and possessions of their ladies."

"And Katrina, what did she do exactly?"

"Everything at the Cloisters, including the stones of the chapels themselves, was purchased from ruins in Europe and reconstructed here. Some were of provenances that were easily traced and proved, while others were just scraps of rock, vandalized as the monasteries broke up over the centuries. This poor fellow," Bellinger said, crouching as he spoke, "was found facedown, being used as part of a bridge to cross a stream in the Alps."

I kneeled beside him and rubbed my hand over the enormous black slab bearing the praying figure of a man.

"So Katrina studied the art form, learning who the sculptors were and how to recognize a particular style of carving or identifiable family traits. It's a continuing effort to verify what we have, and to know when to purchase valuable pieces should they come up for sale on the European market."

I circled the room, looking at all the dead figures in whose company Katrina Grooten had spent her days.

"These sarchophagi," I said, gesturing at the many tombs that lined the walls, some piled on top of each other. "Are there more like these in storage?" "Plenty of them."

"Here?"

"Some here and some at the Met. They've got a vast basement, you know."

"Any reason for Katrina to have some of the others shipped up to the Cloisters? I mean, from periods other than the Middle Ages."

"She's done it, I know. To compare styles. To help scholars who come here to research the way funereal art has changed over the ages."

"Ever had any Egyptian pieces here?" Mike asked.

"I wouldn't doubt it. Shipments come in and out from the Met all the time."

Mercer was moving in another direction. "Was Ms. Grooten involved in anything controversial while she was here?"

Bellinger turned to walk us back toward the exit. "Not that I can think of. She didn't normally operate at a high enough level to cross the big shots at the Met. The bestiary project was an exception, and there she was just on the committee acting in my stead. I wouldn't have thought she'd ruffle any feathers while sitting in for me." Mercer was thumbing through the file as we moved along. "What's the reference in here to the `flea market fiasco,' two years back? It's in a memo from you to Thibodaux."

Bellinger stopped in his tracks. "The young scholars are so idealistic. It wasn't a big deal. Katrina just had to be made to understand the commercial side of museum work."

I repeated Mercer's question. "What exactly was the fiasco about?"

"We got word--"

"Who'swe ?"

"I was with Pierre Thibodaux and Erik Poste at a convention in Geneva. Word got around the place that one of those unusual finds had been made at a local flea market. A small medieval ivory, a carving of a hound chasing a rabbit, very similar to the large version that appears in the stonework outside." Bellinger took a few steps. "I wanted it, for obvious reasons. And Thibodaux was willing to pay the price."

"Was Katrina there?"

"Oh, no. But it's a small world, this museum business. She had heard the rumor about the piece even before I flew back here. Anyway, we tried to buy the ivory but it was too late. It had been promised to the Copenhagen museum." "What was Erik Poste's role in this?"

"Just that it made him furious while the squabbling about who would get the piece was going on, before the Danes firmed it up. Poste wanted Pierre to spend the money on something major for his European painting department rather than on some little rabbit that I coveted. A great portrait, or an artist like Bazille who's underrepresented in the Met collection, rather than a six-inch piece of walrus tusk. We argued, but that happens among us all the time. You can't hold a grudge around here, Ms. Cooper."

"And the carving?"

The reclusive scholar smiled. "One of Thibodaux's favorite smugglers--"

"Smugglers?"

"Yes, Ms. Cooper, you heard me. Pierre has a few favorites he relies on when he doesn't get his own way with his checkbook. It's an old tradition in this field. Anyway, Pierre's man managed to get the piece out of Switzerland in about a week's time, before the arrangements were made to ship it to Copenhagen. For his usual four percent commission. A month later, it was in one of our storerooms deep below Fifth Avenue."

"You stole the carving."

"Surely you don't prosecute crimes that occur in Europe?" Bellinger laughed. "That's been the nature of this work since museums first opened their doors. Some treasures came home in grand style, like Lord Elgin stealing the Greek marbles and setting them up for all the world to see in the British Museum. Others arrived more quietly and were bartered around town in secret. If there weren't grave robbers and petty thieves, I'm afraid there would be far fewer works of art in public institutions everywhere in the world."

"And your precious little object?"

"Will go on display after the summer. There wasn't much of a scandal. We sent the Danes something of ours that they'd been longing for, and I got my ivory. All that was needed was a cooling-down period. People forget after a year or so. They quiet down."

"And Grooten?"

"She learned as we all did. If you're looking for a selfless way to help humanity, Detective, join the Red Cross. If you're going to work in a museum, get used to the fact that most of what you see has been stolen from beneath someone's nose. The great archaeologists who dug in Egypt and Turkey and Pompeii, they all believed what they recovered belonged to them personally. Took the urns and coins and jewels home to display on their own mantels and bandy about at their gaming clubs. Gave them away as gifts. Sold them to the highest bidder."

I looked around the room at the assortment of tombstones from France, Belgium, Spain, and England. Lords and ladies at rest together, far from their intended graves. "The spoils of war and the looted booty of imperial rule, Ms. Cooper. The Trojans did it, the British did it, the Germans did it, and may I add, even the American troops serving in the European and Pacific theaters did it during the Second World War. The only pretty part of this museum acquisition work is what you finally see behind the glass display cabinets."

I was standing beside one such case, mounted on a pedestal, as Bellinger spoke to us. It held the upraised statue of a man's arm, completely silvered and bejeweled, with its long golden fingers raised in a position of blessing. The legend at its base described it as the reliquary of a bishop, and I could see the crystal windows in the arm that once displayed his sainted bones. I wondered what had become of the rest of the poor man's remains.

When we reached the top of the staircase through which we had entered, opposite the gift shop and the cloakroom, Bellinger started to say good-bye.

Mike withdrew a small glassine envelope from his pocket. "What kind of tickets do you use for checking coats here?"

Bellinger looked over his shoulder but there was no one inside. The day had been too mild.

"The usual. A small square with a number on it."

"Like this?" Mike asked, showing him the stub that Dr. Kestenbaum had given to us. "Identical. Ours are blue. All the city-partnered museums use the same system, just different-colored tags."

"Who uses red ones? The Met?"

"No, they've got white ones, if I'm not mistaken. The one you've got there is from the Museum of Natural History."

15

Mercer led us down the steep incline from the Cloisters exit ramp and across the cobblestoned parking lot. Using a map that the case detective had sketched after her interview with Katrina Grooten, he tried to reconstruct the route the young woman had taken the night of her attack almost one year earlier.

"What did you think of Hiram Bellinger?" Mike asked.

"Not what I expected. I thought we'd get old and stodgy." As soon as we reached the bottom of the shallow steps down which Grooten had steered her bicycle, we were engulfed by the thick foliage of shrubs and bushes.