The Book of the Dead (72 page)

“It makes me nervous, being back here,” he muttered. “You know, Nora, I haven’t been in this place since I was a patient here myself. Oh, God. I don’t know if I’ve ever told you, but when the weather changes, I can sometimes still feel an ache in my back where the Surgeon—”

“You’ve told me, Bill,” she said with mock weariness. “Many times.”

The turning of a knob, the soft squeak of hinges, and a door opened onto the porch. A nurse in crisp whites stuck out her head. “You can come in now,” she said. “She’s waiting for you in the west parlor.”

Nora and Smithback followed the nurse into the building and down a long corridor. “How is she?” Smithback asked the nurse.

“Much improved, thank goodness. We were all so worried for her—such a dear thing. And she’s getting better every day. Even so, she gets tired easily: you’ll have to restrict your visit to fifteen minutes.”

“The
dear thing
,” Smithback whispered in Nora’s ear. She poked him playfully in the ribs.

The west parlor was a large, semicircular room that reminded Nora of an Adirondack lodge: polished ceiling beams, pine wainscoting, paper-birch furniture. Oils of sylvan landscapes hung on the walls. A merry fire leaped and crackled in the massive stone fireplace.

And there—propped in a wheelchair in the center of it all—sat Margo Green.

“Margo,” said Nora, and stopped, almost afraid to speak. Beside her, she heard Smithback draw in his breath sharply.

The Margo Green who sat before them was a mere shadow of the feisty woman who had been both academic rival and friend to her at the museum. She was frighteningly thin, and her white skin lay like tissue paper over her veins. Her movements were slow and considered, like someone long unfamiliar with the use of their limbs. And yet her brown hair was rich and glossy, and in her eye was the same spark of life Nora well recalled. Diogenes Pendergast had sent her to a dark and dangerous place—had almost ended her life—but she was on her way back now.

“Hello, you two,” she said in a thin, sleepy voice. “What day is it?”

“It’s Saturday,” Nora said. “April 12.”

“Oh, good. I hoped it was still Saturday.” She smiled.

The nurse came in and bustled around Margo a moment, propping her up more comfortably in the wheelchair. Then she walked around the room, opening curtains and fluffing pillows before leaving them again. Shafts of radiant light streamed into the parlor, falling over Margo’s head and shoulders and gilding her like an angel. Which in a way, Nora thought, she was: having been brought almost to the brink of death by an unusual cocktail of drugs administered to her by Diogenes.

“We brought you something, Margo,” Smithback said, reaching into his coat and bringing out a manila envelope. “We thought you might get a kick out of it.”

Margo took it, opened it slowly. “Why, it’s a copy of my first issue of
Museology!”

“Look inside, it’s been signed by every curator of the Anthropology Department.”

“Even Charlie Prine?” Margo’s eyes twinkled.

Nora laughed. “Even Prine.”

They pulled two seats up beside the wheelchair and sat down.

“The place is just plain
dull
without you, Margo,” Nora said. “You have to hurry up and get well.”

“That’s right,” said Smithback, smiling, his irrepressible good humor returning. “The old pile needs someone to shake it up from time to time, raise some fossil dust.”

Margo laughed quietly. “From what I’ve been reading, the last thing the museum needs right now is more controversy. Is it true four people died in the crush at that Egyptian opening?”

“Yes,” Nora said. “And another sixty were injured, a dozen of them severely.”

She exchanged glances with Smithback. The story that had come out in the two weeks since the opening was that a glitch in the system software caused the sound-and-light show to go out of control, in turn triggering a panic. The truth—that it could have been much, much worse—was so far known only to a select few in the museum and in law enforcement circles.

“Is it true the director was among the injured?” Margo asked.

Nora nodded. “Collopy suffered a seizure of some kind. He’s under psychiatric observation at New York Hospital, but he’s expected to make a full recovery.”

This was true—as far as it went—but of course it wasn’t the full story. Collopy, among several others, had fallen victim to Diogenes’s sound-and-light show, driven half psychotic by the laser pulsing and the low-frequency audio waves. The same might have happened to Nora had she not closed her eyes and covered her ears. As it was, she had suffered nightmares for a week. Pendergast and the others had stopped the show before it could run its full course and inflict permanent damage: and as a result, the prognosis was excellent for Collopy and the others—much better than for the unfortunate tech, Lipper.

Nora shifted in her chair. Someday she would tell Margo everything—but not today. The woman still had a lot of recovery ahead of her.

“What do you think it means for the museum?” Margo asked. “This tragedy at the opening, coming on the heels of the diamond theft?”

Nora shook her head. “At first everybody assumed it was the final straw, especially since the mayor’s wife was among the injured. But it turns out that just the opposite has happened. Thanks to all the controversy, the Tomb of Senef is the hottest show in town. Requests for ticket reservations have been pouring in at an unbelievable rate. I even saw somebody hawking
I Survived the Curse
T-shirts on Broadway this morning.”

“So they’re going to reopen the tomb?” Margo asked.

Smithback nodded. “Fast-tracking it, too. Most of the artifacts were spared. They hope to have it up and running within the month.”

“Our new Egyptologist is recasting the show,” Nora said. “She’s revising the original script, removing some of the cheesier special effects but keeping much of the sound-and-light show intact. She’s a great person, wonderful to work with, funny, unpretentious—we’re lucky to have her.”

“The news reports mentioned some FBI agent as instrumental in the rescue,” Margo said. “That wouldn’t happen to be Agent Pendergast, by any chance?”

“How did you guess?” Nora asked.

“Because Pendergast always manages to get into the thick of things.”

“You’re telling me,” Smithback said, smile fading. Nora noticed him unconsciously massaging the hand that had been burned by acid.

The nurse appeared in the doorway. “Margo, I’ll need to take you back to your room in another five minutes.”

“Okay.” She turned back to them. “I suppose he’s been haunting the museum ever since, asking questions, intimidating bureaucrats, and making a nuisance of himself.”

“Actually, no,” Nora said. “He disappeared right after the opening. Nobody has seen or heard from him since.”

“Really? How strange.”

“Yes, it is,” Nora said. “It’s very strange indeed.”

I
n late May, on the island of Capraia, two people—a man and a woman—sat on a terrace attached to a neat whitewashed house overlooking the Mediterranean. The terrace stood near the edge of a bluff. Below the bluff, surf crawled around pillars of black volcanic rock, wreathed in circling gulls. Beyond lay a blue immensity, stretching as far as the eye could see.

On the terrace, a table of weather-beaten wood was spread with simple food: a round of coarse bread, a plate of small salamis, a bottle of olive oil and a dish of olives, glasses of white wine. The scent of flowering lemons lay heavy in the air, mingling with the perfume of wild rosemary and sea salt. Along the hillside above the terrace, rows of grapevines were shooting out of coiling tendrils of green. The only sound was the faint cry of gulls and the breeze that rustled through a trellis of purple bougainvillea.

The two sat, sipping wine and speaking in low voices. The clothes the woman wore—battered canvas pants and an old work shirt—stood in contrast to her finely cut features and the glossy mahogany hair that spilled down her back. The man’s dress was as formal as the woman’s was informal: black suit of Italian cut, crisp white shirt, understated tie.

Both were watching a third person—a beautiful young woman in a pale yellow dress—who was strolling aimlessly through an olive grove beside the vineyard. From time to time, the young woman stopped to pick a flower, then continued on, twisting the flower in her hands, plucking it to pieces in an absentminded way.

“I think I understand everything now,” the woman on the terrace was saying, “except there’s one thing you didn’t explain: how in the world did you remove the GPS anklet without setting off the alarm?”

The man made a dismissive gesture. “Child’s play. The plastic cuff had a wire inside it that completed a circuit. The idea was that, in removing the cuff, you’d need to cut the wire—thus breaking the circuit and triggering an alarm.”

“So what did you do?”

“I scratched away the plastic in two places along the circuit to expose the wire. Then I attached a loop of wire to each spot, cut the bracelet in between—and took it off. Elementary, my dear Viola.”

“Ah,
je vois!
But where did you get the loop of wire?”

“I made it with foil gum wrappers. I was, unfortunately, obligated to masticate the gum, since I needed it to affix the wire.”

“And the gum? Where did you get that?”

“From my acquaintance in the cell next door, a most talented young man who opened a whole new world for me—that of rhythm and percussion. He gave me one of his precious packs of gum in return for a small favor I did him.”

“What was that?”

“I listened.”

The woman smiled. “What goes around comes around.”

“Perhaps.”

“Speaking of prison, I can’t tell you how thrilled I was to get your wire. I was afraid you wouldn’t be permitted to leave the country for ages.”

“Diogenes left behind enough evidence in his valise to clear me of the murders. That left only three crimes of substance: stealing Lucifer’s Heart; kidnapping the gemologist, Kaplan; and breaking out of prison. Neither the museum nor Kaplan cared to press charges. As for the prison, they would like nothing more than to forget their security was fallible. And so here I am.”

He paused to sip his wine. “That leads me to a question of my own. How is it that you didn’t recognize Menzies as my brother? You’d seen him in disguise before.”

“I’ve wondered about that,” Viola replied. “I saw him as two different people, but neither one was Menzies.”

There was a silence. Viola let her gaze drift again toward the younger woman in the olive grove. “She’s a most unusual girl.”

“Yes,” the man replied. “More unusual than you could even imagine.”

They continued to watch the younger woman drift aimlessly through the twisted trees, like a restless ghost.

“How did she come to be your ward?”

“It’s a long and rather complicated story, Viola. Someday I’ll tell you—I promise.”

The woman smiled, sipped her wine. For a moment, silence settled over them.

“How do you like the new vintage?” she asked. “I broke it out especially for the occasion.”

“As delightful as the old one. It’s from your grapes, I assume?”