The Murder in the Museum of Man (24 page)

The lieutenant could sense, I know, that I was holding something back. And I might have told him about the missing archives from the Loa Hoa expedition and about the apparent disappearance of Skull Number One had I not suffered again from a strange hubris: the missing files were something I had found out about. They were
my
missing evidence. And as the interview, or interrogation if you prefer, wound down, I was inspired again to get to the bottom of these awful crimes myself.

Almost apologetically the lieutenant told me that, technically at least, I remained a suspect. “You have a motive, Mr. de Ratour. You don’t have much of an alibi. And you admit being at the scene at the time of the murder.”

“Disappearance,” I corrected him.

“Yes,” he echoed, “disappearance,” and got up to go. He paused at the door to tell me, with a trace of facetiousness, not to leave town without informing him. Then the phone began ringing again. I ignored it. I opened my desk and took out the Fessing file, which I had presumed closed. I leafed through my black book. I couldn’t get Thad Pilty out of my mind. I kept seeing and feeling the extraordinary anger he had shown at last week’s meeting of the Oversight Committee. Then, on a strange impulse, I took out my father’s revolver. I unloaded it, held it in both hands, aimed at the wall, and pulled the trigger several times, feeling the oiled mechanism click smoothly. Then, feeling the nugget weight of each deadly cartridge, I reloaded it.

Well, I think I have earned a good vintage with my dinner at the Club tonight. I don’t imagine there will be much joking this time about how good or bad deans do or don’t taste. I can already feel the fear rising around the whole place. We are all looking at one another with more and more suspicion. I must say I would feel more secure if I could carry the gun tucked snugly somewhere on my person.

It has been only a few days since Dean Scrabbe’s disappearance, and already it seems like an eternity. Everyone is on tenterhooks wondering what grisliness is about to be served up. The news media have been unmerciful, utterly unmerciful. They are assiduous in reporting every silly and grotesque rumor, including one about UFOs and cannibal aliens from outer space. Malachy Morin has been linked to a rumored “cannibal cult” among the
faculty, that association with the professoriat conferring on the poor wretch a dubious kind of status. I cannot open my front door without finding some journalist or other waiting there with some imbecilic or gratuitously insulting question. Just last night I thought I heard one of them rooting around out in my trash bins. It turned out to be a large, bold raccoon, and I nearly expected it to start hectoring me. At the same time I confess to being relieved to see them, the journalists, I mean. The pall of fear that has settled on our little community is positively palpable. Each pair of averted eyes asks the same question: Am I next? To be murdered is bad enough; to be murdered, cooked, and eaten is simply
hors concours
. And if a full-grown man in all the vigor of his middle years can be plucked in broad daylight from his office in a public institution, are any of us safe?

Indeed, I have finally taken matters into my own hands and written to each member of the Board of Governors a detailed letter regarding the situation around here. I pointed out to them the clause in the Rules of Governance that not merely enables me to take such a step but in fact
requires
that, with or without the consent of the Director, I bring to their attention matters of paramount importance. I reiterated, of course, my respect for Dr. Commer, while pointing out that, if anything, that aging scholar’s infirmities have grown more pronounced with time. I wrote that I was prompted to this act in part by the situation created by the (presumed) murders of Fessing and Scrabbe and by Malachy Morin’s arrest and pending indictment, which has created more of a managerial vacuum than had existed heretofore. I stated that trends were developing which, if allowed to continue, could prove disastrous to the museum.

Another matter regarding the governance of the museum concerns me as well. I was the recipient this week of another communication through the e-mail from the Genetics Lab. I am glad now that I have entered all of these into this unofficial log, as
they show a definite trend. Again, I will let the document speak for itself:

Despite everything, I have, with effort, been able of late to find much comfort in researching the history of this marvelous place. What a boon, what a balm it has been to delve into the past! How simple everything seemed in those days! Among the family archives I have found some absolute treasures, including a bundle of letters between Othniel Remick and Sarah Goodfellow during their courtship. Extraordinary how civilized people were then, at least in the sentiments they expressed to each other. In a letter dated June 14, 1823, Othniel writes in part:

Reading that put in me mind of my own dear Elsbeth. It wasn’t just Othniel’s letter. Around this time of year I am particularly vulnerable to what used to a bittersweet melancholy one might call the blues — especially when I think of her. Just standing near the north window of my office, with its partial view of Shag Bay and the sailboats tautly propped against an onshore breeze, reminds me of other summers and of one in particular when I wasn’t here. Elsbeth sailed her father’s boat up on Lake Longing. I never took much pleasure in jibbing and tacking, coming about, being close-hauled, although I did like going wing to wing before the wind. But moving for its own sake never moved me. The illusion, I suppose, is that we are going someplace, not merely making the rounds of the inevitable circles, however ingenious, that we all revolve in. It was just about this time of the summer that I dropped out of her circles. It was the summer after she graduated from Wainscott. I should have proposed to her then, but I hesitated, not wanting, I told myself, to stand in the way of any career she might pursue.

Of course, I can see in retrospect that I was at least as concerned about the impact an engagement and subsequent marriage would have on my own career. Just that February I had been accepted by Professor Calloway to join the Wainscott
team excavating the Greco-Roman levels of a site at Infra, which is just inland on the coast of North Africa. I had come to archaeology late, having taken my undergraduate degree in fine arts. Following my own graduation three years earlier and during the year I was at Jesus College, Oxford, studying under Blecky, I had begun to reject the notion of “fine arts”
per se
, a rather radical departure at the time. I saw that all art was “fine” provided it was competently done within its own terms: the finely etched boomerang of a naked aborigine is superior
tout court
to a mediocre oil from the Quattrocento. Having said that, I must insist that, where art is concerned, aesthetic standards should concede nothing to ethical or ideological considerations. Aesthetics constitutes a moral system of its own, and simply because a member of some “marginalized” group (awful terms they use these days) has made something does not endow it with any intrinsic value as art. Eskimos and Berbers are as capable of kitsch as the middlebrow Americans who, in buying such stuff, participate in its propagation.

But I have wandered from my subject. The fact is, I had at the time embraced archaeology with all the enthusiasm of youth, and I was full of passionate eagerness to join the team at Infra, having helped catalog some of the artifacts from earlier digs. It did not seem proper to propose to a woman and then leave immediately for nearly three months. Engagements, I have always thought, are a time of growing intimacy, when two people come to know each other by spending time together. Instead, I was spending less time with Elsbeth. As the mid-June departure date approached, I was in a veritable tizzy of preparation. I bought myself one of those Australian slouch hats that tie up at the side and the kind of shorts issued by the British Army in warm climates. I packed and repacked my kit. I suffered the necessary inoculations gladly. I read constantly. Elsbeth wasn’t absent from my mind; indeed, I think in some ways I was doing it
for her. I imagined the snapshots of myself at the dig — begrimed and bewhiskered, in slouch hat and shorts — that I would send to her with long letters full of vivid details about what we were unearthing from the past. I imagined returning to her in September, sunburned and roughened, a man!

Our good-byes were quite tender. Although we were not formally engaged, promises were made on the basis of which we allowed ourselves intimacies previously denied, but which stopped well short of any kind of consummation. I was moved by her tears when for the last time we kissed before I boarded the train at the old Seaboard station, a beautiful place since leveled to make room for a slum. In grand Hollywood style, she stood on the receding platform waving while I, from the open window of my compartment, waved back.

Infra, I must say, exceeded all my expectations. Never before or since has drudgery been such bliss. It is difficult to describe the kind of exhilaration that comes when, digging on your knees, sometimes with your bare hands, but always so carefully, you unearth through the sand next to an ancient wall, as I did, a charmingly simple clay jar complete with a fitted top and decorated with the red glaze characteristic of the region. With infinite care, with my fingertips, I brushed away the grime of centuries, put down its exact location, and then, in Professor Calloway’s presence, removed the top to find it half filled with clean, hard grains of wheat. There I was, in the full brunt of the midday sun, unearthing and fingering palpable history, resurrecting beauty, making time disappear so that I was, for a transcendent, displaced moment, in a sunny courtyard millennia ago among those early Greek colonists.

A more private bliss arrived with Elsbeth’s first letter. It was an unconditional declaration of love on her part such as she had never made before. She missed me horribly, she said, and the next few paragraphs made me nearly blush as she conjured in
quite graphic detail what to expect my first night back. I was deeply moved. I went out of my tent and peered up at the stars, which, in that high, dry air, were preternaturally bright. I decided then that we would build a life together, a strong physical, spiritual, and artistic life during which our periodic separations would only sharpen the passion. I wrote back telling her how much I missed her, how I thought about her in all her aspects, and how I had something very important to ask her when I returned. I enclosed a snapshot of myself in slouch hat and shorts that our resourceful photo technician, despite very rough conditions (we were at least a hundred kilometers from any sizable habitation) had been able to print.

I was somewhat perplexed but not alarmed when the post, erratic at best, failed to bring an answering letter from Elsbeth during the next couple of weeks. I was working, after all, from dawn until light failed in the evening. I had something of a small social life in the mess tent with the other members of the expedition, who were given to drinking great quantities of beer. I confess to a slight flirtation with an attractive blonde woman from California. It came to nothing, of course; I was irrevocably committed to Elsbeth. I was somewhat shocked but not entirely surprised to see this same young woman early one morning leaving the tent of Professor Calloway’s chief assistant, a married man. (I’m not sure how they managed, since all of us, I know, had only those narrow army cots.)