The Bone Vault - Linda Fairstein (48 page)

"Brother?" Mike asked.

"In one of our interviews, he told us his older brother had stayed on in Kenya, remember? To do his father's work." At the time, I assumed that meant guiding safaris, going on museum explorations.

"Kirk Van der Poste. He's the half brother. Eight years older than Erik. His mother passed away of malaria. The father married a second time, then died when Erik was twelve. When he wrote to Kirk that he was coming to the Natural History Museum to work on an exhibition, that's when Kirk told him that all the collections their father had brought here were being dismantled and stored away. Even worse, being given back to native tribes."

"How did Kirk know that?"

"From his contacts at the McGregor, in South Africa."

"Hadn't either of them been here since they were kids?" "How could they get up here into these storerooms? They had no more access than total strangers. Last year was the first time Erik set foot in this museum since his father was killed. Just think what an opportunity the exhibition work gave him. A free pass to wander around up here, looking for anything he wanted."

"And Kirk, he wanted the bones?"

"Everything else that went with them. When those graves were plundered, along came all the looted pieces that no one else valued at the time. Bronze castings, Swahili wooden grave markers, terra-cotta potteries. They must all be stashed away in here, with rhino horns and elephant tusks. Hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth, collected by Willem Van der Poste. Bounty to sell to museums, and for even higher prices on the thriving black market."

We were standing in the middle of a small fortune in bones.

"How did Kirk know?"

"He had heard enough back in Africa to understand what his father was doing. Plus, he'd inherited some of his father's early field journals."

"The what?"

"Field journals. The records of all the expeditions, the ledger entries that documented the museums where things were sold or stored. Erik Poste was indifferent to our mission to return the bones. He just thought it was foolish political correctness. All museums had baggage. Things were different fifty, a hundred years ago. But he knew that Katrina would stumble--had stumbled upon something much more valuable the last week of her life."

"The arsenic, did he talk about that?"

She nodded. "He started out defending himself to me. Telling me that he had only tried to make her sick. Sick enough to want to go home to South Africa. That the small amounts of it he put in her drinks, when they were together at the museum working late into the evenings, would never have killed her."

Dr. Kestenbaum had told me the same thing. If the occasional poisoning had stopped, Katrina would have recovered when she reached South Africa. When the ME got back the toxicology results on Katrina's hair samples, they would reveal precisely when the poisoning had started and what the doses had been.

"The rape, he knew about that?"

"Anna Friedrichs told him." She insisted to us that she had, although Poste had played dumb during our interviews. "He took advantage of that. And of September eleventh, too. Everyone thought, even Katrina herself, that her physical symptoms were the result of the stress of the sexual assault and the terrorist attacks. Like everyone else she was anxious about more bombings and the anthrax scares that made us all so nervous."

Each of us remembered the torment of those painful fall days.

"Yet she didn't want to leave New York until she could find the aboriginal bones that she hoped to get back to Africa. Poste just wanted to speed up her exit, weaken her resolve."

"Something must have changed his mind."

"Right before Christmas," she said. "He thought this was what I was referring to in that e-mail you had me send, Alex. That's why he was so driven to ask me about it. When Katrina was offered the job at the McGregor Museum in Kimberley, she knew they had already begun the process of trying to identify the stacks of skeletons they have, to return them to the native peoples, to their tribes, for burial.

"One of the curators phoned her. Asked her what she knew about Willem Van der Poste's specimens, whether she could get a look at them and ask Mamdouba's help in arranging the return of the bones. The man who called her had dealings in Africa with Kirk. Knew that Erik Poste worked at the Met. He suggested she approach him for help making a pitch to the museum administrators. Thought Erik would want to polish up his father's reputation."

"Again, he turned her down, right?"

"Yes. But she came up with another idea. To enlist the help of Van der Poste's widow, and get her support for doing the right thing."

"Erik's mother?" He had mentioned his mother to me, when he told us about moving to this country as a child. That she was ill. That because she was hospitalized he was sent away to boarding school. "She's still alive? How did Katrina find her?"

"Museum records. Correspondence they had with her after Willem's death."

"But she must have been very sickly to have been hospitalized for so long so many years ago," I said.

"She was sick, all right. Mental illness. Profound depression, which she's suffered from all her life. And Erik had severed his relationship with her when he was still an adolescent."

"You knew about this?"

"No, no. But Erik assumed Katrina had told me. He kept talking about his mother when he was tying me up. I'm putting it together from the pieces he was rambling about."

"Did his mother meet with Katrina?"

"Not only spoke to her. Mrs. Poste gave Katrina the field journals, the ones from Willem's later years. The ones that Kirk didn't inherit. He had a lot more to hide than smuggled ivory." "What--?"

Clem inhaled and looked at me. "He didn't die the way Erik told you he did. Not as some noble hunter protecting the animals from poachers."

"What happened?"

"Willem Van der Poste was leading a safari. All amateurs. He was trampled by a bull elephant, nearly crushed to death. He made the tourists go on with several of the guides, expecting them to send back more help to carry him out of the jungle. He couldn't hunt, couldn't move his legs at all."

We stared at Clem silently, waiting for her to speak again.

"Days passed. He ran out of food, out of supplies." She glanced around at the bones on the shelves surrounding us. "It's unthinkable, really. He shot his servant, his bearer. The native who had introduced him to Africa and protected him over the decades. Cannibalized him--"

"You don't need to go on. We get the picture," Mike said. "No wonder his wife wanted to change her name."

And no wonder she never emerged from the depression that engulfed her after learning the truth. "So one night last December, when Katrina had come back from the sanitarium with the field journals that would completely shatter Van der Poste's reputation, she made the mistake of showing them to Erik. Naively, she thought they would make him see our side of the issue. Make him want to help the aborigines who had been so mistreated for so very long."

"He must have decided to kill her that very night," I said.

"With a massive dose of arsenic," Mike added. "Somewhere in this mausoleum."

I looked around the room at the sinister collection of skulls and skeletons. "Up here?"

Mercer didn't think so. "She may have found this room. Lots of others like it. He probably killed her in the basement, though. Zimm took me to some places you couldn't find without sonar. Remote, cool, dry. Big empty bins that would hold a dead animal twice the size of Katrina. You wouldn't see it, you wouldn't smell it. Once he gets his sarcophagus in place, just lifts her in and slides the lid shut."

"You think Bermudez was an accomplice?"

"Unwittingly." Clem tried to get on her feet and I helped her stand. She flexed her feet to make sure the circulation had been restored. "I asked him if the guy who fell off the Met last week had helped him--you know--hurt Katrina. I thought maybe he killed himself, out of remorse for what he had done."

"What did he tell you?"

"How stupid I was. Stupid, I guess, to think he'd let some janitor help him. Bermudez was in charge of the crew who loaded the sarcophagus onto the truck for shipment. He must have seen the story in the newspaper about Katrina. That's when he showed up in Poste's office. Poste says the guy guessed that he knew something about Katrina's death and demanded money. Blackmail. Poste gave him a down payment. Said he'd meet him with more money later in the week. Everybody knew about the poor man's Friday-morning check of the water treatment center, apparently."

"He admitted pushing Bermudez?"

"He just laughed at me and told me they parted ways on the rooftop last Friday."

43

The entire spring sky was spread out overhead. The hindquarters of Ursa Major, the Great Bear, were clearly defined in the familiar shape of the Big Dipper. The North Star pointed to Leo, arcing eastward to the constellation of Virgo. And just rising in the northeast for the first time was the sparkling white summer star, Vega.

I leaned my head against the back of the seat, in the rear row of the Hayden Planetarium Space Theater, and listened to the chief of detectives brief the press corps on the arrest of Erik Poste, who had just been taken out of the museum in handcuffs. It was four-thirty in the morning and I was sitting by myself as the reporters fired questions at the police brass and the exhausted detectives.

"You're telling us he acted alone?"

"That's right. Detective Chapman will explain a bit of the background about Mr. Poste and his father," the chief said, stepping back from the podium and giving Mike some play.

"That accident at the Met last Friday? Related to the Grooten death?"

The chief stepped in front of Mike and took control of the microphone again. "We're not going to go into the evidence we've got at this point, but it's safe to say that we're no longer treating that as an accident."

"How about that arm in the diorama? The one that freaked out the schoolkids?"

"My latent print unit tells me that there are fingerprints of value on that. We'll be doing comparisons with our suspect, of course. Mr. Poste did have access to the master keys that open the diorama cabinets."

"You think he did that just to cast suspicion on the custodial workers over here?" "You're just speculating now, Mr. Diamond. I know you can build an entire story around that arm, so I'll just leave it to your editors' judgment. If that's what they call it at thePost. "

The other reporters laughed. They had most of their information and were ready to leave.

Mr. Mamdouba tapped the chief on the shoulder and said something to him.

"Before you guys go, Elijah Mamdouba--the director of curatorial affairs here--would like to say a few words."

Some of the reporters took their seats. Others ignored the diminutive figure and filed out to call in their stories.

"This is a very strange circumstance for us, ladies and gentlemen. Very awkward indeed." He was speaking to a small audience, maybe twelve or thirteen reporters were left in the room, but he was clearly hoping his words would be printed for millions to read.

"It was in one of the two most magnificent rooms in the city of New York, at the Temple of Dendur in our sister museum across the park--a mere week ago-- that my colleague Pierre Thibodaux first learned of the discovery of Miss Grooten's body.

"We inform you about the conclusion of this tragedy today in this other stunning arena here at the planetarium, part of our spectacular Museum of Natural History." He gestured around him at the superb new facility at the Rose Center, the most powerful virtual-reality simulator in the world.

Mamdouba was not wrong. Both of these brilliant institutions were the city's finest showcases. Acres and acres of exhibits, millions and millions of paintings, objects, specimens, and artifacts. Thousands of dedicated scholars and scientists who devoted their lives to assembling these unrivaled collections of art, in one case, and scientific wonders in the other.

"Over time," Mamdouba went on, "we have reflected within our walls and our laboratories the society in which we live, in which we study and are educated. Overcoming the ignorance of those who went before us has become an inevitable part of our process of growth, whether it was about evolution or the environment, about racial stereotypes, animal extinction, or space exploration."

I couldn't think of any places in the entire country that were responsible for the education and enlightenment of more people than the Metropolitan and the Natural History Museum. How ironic, then, and how bizarre, that a quiet young scholar had met her death because of her work beneath these roofs.

Mamdouba was finishing his remarks. "That the scientific community once used human beings from primitive cultures for their research in such profoundly disturbing ways has caused every museum in the world to do some soul-searching. That animal specimens were so necessary for examination and studies that affected their own viability on our earth created a paradox in terms of conserving those very creatures that have become endangered."

He went on about scientists and visionaries, explorers and anthropologists and paleontologists, the mission and the paradox, the vision and the tragedy. The reporters stayed until he spoke his piece, riveted again by the marvels that had been brought together under this splendid tangle of rooftops.

When he finished speaking and the reporters departed, I sat in my plush seat and waited for the chief to dismiss the detectives. I closed my eyes.

When I opened them five minutes later, having dozed off, some motion in the seat bottom of my chair jolted me awake. The room was empty, except for Mike, Mercer, and me.

"Liftoff," Mike said. "Time to wake up. Zimm's got us tickets for the fiveA.M . early bird special. He's in the control room with the janitor. Thinks you deserve a private display."

Speakers and woofers that vibrated to give the audience the sense of a real space launch at the start of the show were wired into each seat. Mercer was holding a bag of microwaved popcorn that he must have found in some lab worker's office, and Mike was pouring Clem's minibar bottles of scotch and vodka into three plastic cups.