Pendergast [07] The Book of the Dead Read online

  “We don’t want anything cheesy,” she said. “No mummies popping up from their sarcophagi. And it’s got to be educational.”

  “My feelings exactly.”

  Nora thought a moment. “The tomb was robbed, am I right?”

  “It was robbed in antiquity, like most Egyptian tombs, probably by the very priests who buried Senef—who, by the way, was not a pharaoh, but vizier and regent to Thutmosis IV.”

  Nora digested this. It was, she supposed, a huge honor to be asked to coordinate a major new exhibition—and this one would have exceptionally high visibility. It was intriguing. She found herself being drawn into it, despite herself.

  “If you’re looking for something dramatic,” she said, “why not re-create the moment of the robbery itself? We could dramatize the robbers at work—show their fear of being caught, what would happen to them if they were caught—with a voice-over explaining what was happening, who Senef was, that sort of thing.”

  Menzies nodded. “Excellent, Nora.”

  Nora felt a mounting excitement. “If done right, with computerized lighting and so forth, it would give visitors an experience they’d never forget. Make history come alive inside the tomb itself.”

  “Nora, someday you’ll be director of this museum.”

  She blushed. The idea did not displease her.

  “I’d been thinking of some sort of sound-and-light show myself. It’s perfect.” With uncharacteristic exuberance, Menzies seized Nora’s hand. “This is going to save the museum. And it will make your career here. As I said, you’ll have all the money and support you’ll need. As for the computer effects, let me manage that side of things—you focus on the objects and displays. Six weeks will be just enough time to get the buzz going, get out the invitations, and work the press. They won’t be able to trash the museum if they’re angling to be invited.”

  He glanced at his watch. “I’ve got to prepare Dr. Collopy for the press conference. Thank you so much, Nora.”

  He bustled out, leaving Nora alone in the silent laboratory. She turned her eye regretfully to the table she had so carefully arranged with potsherds, and then she started picking them up, one at a time, and returning them to their storage bags.

  7

  Special agent Spencer Coffey rounded the corner and approached the warden’s office, his steel-capped heels making a satisfying tattoo against the polished cement floor. Short, bottle-mustached Agent Rabiner followed, deferentially riding his wake. Coffey paused before the institutional oak door, gave a tap, then opened it without waiting for an invitation.

  The warden’s secretary, a thin bleach-blonde with old acne scars on her face and a no-bullshit attitude, gave him the once-over. “Yes?”

  “Agent Coffey, Federal Bureau of Investigation.” He waved his badge. “We’ve got an appointment, and we’re in a hurry.”

  “I’ll tell the warden you’re here,” she said, her upstate hick accent grating on his nerves.

  Coffey glanced at Rabiner and rolled his eyes. He’d already had a run-in with the woman over a dropped connection when he called earlier that day, and now, meeting her in person, he confirmed she was everything he despised, a low-class hayseed who’d clawed her way into a position of semirespectability.

  “Agent Coffey and—?” She glanced at Rabiner.

  “Special Agent Coffey and Special Agent Rabiner.”

  The woman picked up the intercom phone with insolent slowness. “Agents Coffey and Rabiner to see you, sir. They say they have an appointment.”

  She listened for a moment, and then hung up. She waited just long enough to let Coffey know she wasn’t in nearly the hurry he was. “Mr. Imhof,” she finally said, “will see you.”

  Coffey started to walk past her desk. Then he paused. “So. How are things down on the farm?”

  “Seems to be ruttin’ season for hogs,” she responded without a pause, not even looking at him.

  Coffey continued into the inner office, wondering just what the bitch meant and whether he’d been insulted or not.

  As Coffey shut the door behind them, Warden Gordon Imhof rose from behind a large Formica desk. Coffey hadn’t seen him in person before, and found the man far younger than he expected, small and neat, with a goatee and cool blue eyes. He was impeccably dressed and sported a helmet of blow-dried hair. Coffey couldn’t quite pigeonhole him. In the old days, wardens came through the ranks; but this fellow looked like he’d gotten some Ph.D. somewhere in correctional facility management and had never felt the satisfying thok! of a nightstick striking human flesh. Still, there was a thinness to the lips that boded well.

  Imhof extended his hand to Coffey and Rabiner. “Have a seat.”

  “Thank you.”

  “How did the interrogation go?”

  “Our case is developing,” Coffey said. “If this doesn’t fit the federal death penalty statute to a T, I don’t know what does. But it’s no slam dunk. There are certain complications.” He didn’t mention that the interrogation had, in fact, gone badly—very badly.

  Imhof’s face was inscrutable.

  “I want to make something clear,” Coffey continued. “One of this killer’s victims was a colleague and friend of mine, the third most decorated agent in the history of the FBI.”

  He let that sink in. What he didn’t mention was that this victim, Special Agent in Charge Mike Decker, was responsible for a humiliating demotion Coffey had been hit with seven years before, in the wake of the museum killings, and that nothing in his life had satisfied Coffey more than hearing about his death—except the news of who’d done it.

  That had been a special moment.

  “So you’ve got a very special prisoner, Mr. Imhof. He’s a sociopathic serial killer of the most dangerous kind—murdered at least three people, although our interest in him is restricted to the murder of the federal agent. We’re letting the State of New York worry about the others, but we hope by the time they convict we’ll already have the prisoner strapped to a gurney with a needle in his arm.”

  Imhof, listening, inclined his head.

  “The prisoner is also an arrogant bastard. I worked with him on a case years ago. He thinks he’s better than everyone else, thinks he’s above the rules. He’s got no respect for authority.”

  At the mention of respect, Imhof finally seemed to respond. “If there’s one thing I demand as warden of this institution, it’s respect. Good discipline begins and ends with respect.”

  “Exactly,” said Coffey. He decided to follow up this line, see if he could get Imhof to bite. “Speaking of respect, during the interrogation the prisoner had some choice things to say about you.”

  Now he could see Imhof getting interested.

  “But they don’t bear repeating,” Coffey went on. “Naturally, you and I have learned to rise above such pettiness.”

  Imhof leaned forward. “If a prisoner has shown a lack of respect—and I’m not talking about anything personal here, but a lack of respect for the institution in any way—I need to know about it.”

  “It was the usual bullshit and I’d hate to repeat it.”

  “Nevertheless, I’d like to know.”

  Of course, the prisoner had, in fact, said nothing. That had been the problem.

  “He referred to you as a beer-swilling Nazi bastard, a Boche, a Kraut, that sort of thing.”

  Imhof’s face tightened slightly, and Coffey knew immediately he’d scored a hit.

  “Anything else?” the warden asked quietly.

  “Very crude stuff, something about the size of your—ah, well, I don’t even recall the details.”

  There was a frosty silence. Imhof’s goatee quivered slightly.

  “As I said, it was all bullshit. But it points out an important fact: the prisoner hasn’t seen the wisdom of cooperating. And you know why? Everything stays the same for him whether he answers our questions or not, whether he shows respect for you or the institution or not. That’s got to change. He has to learn that his wrong choices hav
e consequences. And another thing: he’s got to be kept in total, utter isolation. He can’t be allowed to pass any messages to the outside. There have been allegations that he might be in league with a brother, still on the lam. So no phone calls, no more meetings with his lawyer, total blackout of communication with the outside world. We wouldn’t want any further, ah, collateral damage to occur due to lack of vigilance. Do you understand what I mean, Warden?”

  “I certainly do.”

  “Good. He’s got to be made to see the advantages of cooperation. I’d love to work him over with a rubber hose and a cattle prod—he deserves nothing less—but unfortunately that’s not possible, and we sure as hell don’t want to do anything that could come back to haunt us at the trial. He may be crazy, but he’s not dumb. You can’t give a guy like that an opening. He’s got enough money to dig up Johnnie Cochran and hire him for the defense.”

  Coffey stopped talking. Because for the first time, Imhof had smiled. And something about the look in the man’s blue eyes chilled Coffey.

  “I understand your problem, Agent Coffey. The prisoner must be shown the value of respect. I’ll see to it personally.”

  8

  On the morning appointed for opening the sealed Tomb of Senef, Nora arrived in Menzies’s capacious office to find him sitting in his usual wing chair, in conversation with a young man. They both rose as she came in.

  “Nora,” he said. “This is Dr. Adrian Wicherly, the Egyptologist I mentioned to you. Adrian, this is Dr. Nora Kelly.”

  Wicherly turned to her with a smile, a thatch of untidy brown hair the only eccentricity in his otherwise perfectly dressed and groomed person. At a glance, Nora took in the understated Savile Row suit, the fine wing tips, the club tie. Her sweep came to rest on an extraordinarily handsome face: dimpled cheeks, flashing blue eyes, and perfect white teeth. He was, she thought, no more than thirty.

  “Delighted to meet you, Dr. Kelly,” he said in an elegant Oxbridge accent. He clasped her hand gently, blessing her with another dazzling smile.

  “A pleasure. And please call me Nora.”

  “Of course. Nora. Forgive my formality—my stuffy upbringing has left me rather hamstrung this side of the pond. I just want to say how smashing it is to be here, working on this project.”

  Smashing. Nora suppressed a smile—Adrian Wicherly was almost a caricature of the dashing young Brit, of a type she didn’t think even existed outside P. G. Wodehouse novels.

  “Adrian comes to us with some impressive credentials,” Menzies said. “D.Phil. from Oxford, directed the excavation of the tomb KV 42 in the Valley of the Kings, university professor of Egyptology at Cambridge, author of the monograph Pharaohs of the XX Dynasty.”

  Nora looked at Wicherly with fresh respect. He was amazingly young for an archaeologist of such stature. “Very impressive.”

  Wicherly put on a self-deprecating face. “A lot of academic rubbish, really.”

  “It’s hardly that.” Menzies glanced at his watch. “We’re meeting someone from the Maintenance Department at ten. As I understand it, nobody knows quite precisely where the Tomb of Senef is anymore. The one certainty is that it was bricked up and has been inaccessible ever since. We’re going to have to break our way in.”

  “How intriguing,” said Wicherly. “I feel rather like Howard Carter.”

  They descended in an old brass elevator, which creaked and groaned its way to the basement. They emerged in the Maintenance Section and threaded a complex path through the machine shop and carpentry, at last arriving at the open door of a small office. Inside, a small man sat at a desk, poring over a thick press of blueprints. He rose as Menzies rapped on the door frame.

  “I’d like to introduce you both to Mr. Seamus McCorkle,” said Menzies. “He probably knows more about the layout of the museum than anyone alive.”

  “Which still isn’t saying much,” said McCorkle. He was an elvish man in his early fifties with a fine Celtic face and a high, whistling voice. He pronounced the final word mitch.

  After completing the introductions, Menzies turned back to McCorkle. “Have you found our tomb?”

  “I believe so.” McCorkle nodded at the slab of old blueprints. “It’s not easy, finding things in this old pile.”

  “Why ever not?” Wicherly asked.

  McCorkle began rolling up the top blueprint. “The museum consists of thirty-four interconnected buildings, with a footprint of more than six acres, over two million square feet of space, and eighteen miles of corridors—and that’s not even counting the sub-basement tunnels, which no one’s ever surveyed or diagrammed. I once tried to figure out how many rooms there were in this joint, gave up when I hit a thousand. It’s been under constant construction and renovation for every single one of its hundred and forty years. That’s the nature of a museum—collections get moved around, rooms get joined together, others get split apart and renamed. And a lot of these changes are made on the fly, without blueprints.”

  “But surely they couldn’t lose an entire Egyptian tomb!” said Wicherly.

  McCorkle laughed. “That would be difficult, even for this museum. It’s finding the entrance that might be tricky. It was bricked up in 1935 when they built the connecting tunnel from the 81st Street subway station.” He tucked the blueprints under his arm and picked up an old leather bag that lay on his desk. “Shall we?”

  “Lead the way,” said Menzies.

  They set off along a puke-green corridor, past maintenance rooms and storage areas, through a heavily trafficked section of the basement. As they went along, McCorkle gave a running account. “This is the metal shop. This is the old physical plant, once home to the ancient boilers, now used to store the collection of whale skeletons. Jurassic dinosaur storage… Cretaceous… Oligocene mammals… Pleistocene mammals… dugongs and manatees…”

  The storage areas gave way to laboratories, their shiny, stainless-steel doors in contrast to the dingy corridors, lit with caged lightbulbs and lined with rumbling steam pipes.

  They passed through so many locked doors Nora lost count. Some were old and required keys, which McCorkle selected from a large ring. Other doors, part of the museum’s new security system, he opened by swiping a magnetic card. As they moved deeper into the fabric of the building, the corridors became progressively empty and silent.

  “I daresay this place is as vast as the British Museum,” said Wicherly.

  McCorkle snorted in contempt. “Bigger. Much bigger.”

  They came to an ancient set of riveted metal doors, which McCorkle opened with a large iron key. Darkness yawned beyond. He hit a switch and illuminated a long, once-elegant corridor lined with dingy frescoes. Nora squinted: they were paintings of a New Mexico landscape, with mountains, deserts, and a multistoried Indian ruin she recognized as Taos Pueblo.

  “Fremont Ellis,” said Menzies. “This was once the Hall of the Southwest. Shut down since the forties.”

  “These are extraordinary,” said Nora.

  “Indeed. And very valuable.”

  “They’re rather in need of curation,” said Wicherly. “That’s a rather nasty stain, there.”

  “It’s a question of money,” Menzies said. “If our count hadn’t stepped forward with the necessary grant, the Tomb of Senef would probably have been left to sleep for another seventy years.”

  McCorkle opened another door, revealing another dim hall turned into storage, full of shelves covered with beautifully painted pots. Old oaken cabinets stood against the walls, fronted with rippled glass, revealing a profusion of dim artifacts.

  “The Southwest collections,” McCorkle said.

  “I had no idea,” said Nora, amazed. “These should be available for study.”

  “As Adrian pointed out, they need to be curated first,” Menzies said. “Once again, a question of money.”

  “It’s not only money,” McCorkle added, with a strange, pinched expression on his face.

  Nora exchanged glances with Wicherly. “I’m sorry?” sh
e asked.

  Menzies cleared his throat. “I think what Seamus means is that the, ah, first Museum Beast killings happened in the vicinity of the Hall of the Southwest.”

  In the silence that followed, Nora made a mental note to have a look at these collections later—preferably, in the company of a large group. Maybe she could write a grant to see them moved to updated storage.

  Another door gave way to a smaller room, lined floor-to-ceiling with black metal drawers. Half hidden behind the drawers were ancient posters and announcements from the twenties and thirties, with art deco lettering and images of Gibson Girls. In an earlier era, it must have been an antechamber of sorts. The room smelled of paradichlorobenzene and something bad—like old beef jerky, Nora decided.

  At the far end, a great dim hall opened up. In the reflected light, she could see that its walls were covered with frescoes of the pyramids of Giza and the Sphinx as they had appeared when first built.

  “Now we’re approaching the old Egyptian galleries,” McCorkle said.

  They entered the vast hall. It had been turned into storage space: shelving was covered in transparent plastic sheets, which were in turn overlaid with dust.

  McCorkle unrolled the blueprints, squinted at them in the dim light. “If my estimations are correct, the entrance to the tomb was in what is now the annex, at the far end.”

  Wicherly went to one shelf, lifted the plastic. Beneath, Nora could make out metal shelves crowded with pottery vessels, gilded chairs and beds, headrests, canopic jars, and smaller figurines in alabaster, faience, and ceramic.

  “Good Lord, this is one of the finest collections of ushabtis I’ve ever seen.” Wicherly turned excitedly to Nora. “Why, there’s enough material here alone to fill up the tomb twice over.” He picked up an ushabti and turned it over with reverence. “Old Kingdom, II Dynasty, reign of the pharaoh Hetepsekhemwy.”