Dance of Death (43 page)

He took Nora's hand, placed the cold glass into it, patted her on the back, and sat down. "Did anyone ever tell you what a genius you are?" He chuckled. "That was the most dashing publicity coup it has been my privilege to witness."

Nora shook her head. "It could have been a publicity disaster."

"It
would
have been a disaster if you hadn't been on the scene. But not only did you handle the Tanos, but you made the museum look downright benevolent. Brilliant, just brilliant." He practically chortled with pleasure, his eyes sparkling. Nora had never seen him so animated.

She took a slug of champagne. It had been the week from hell, with Bill threatened and in hiding, Margo's murder, the stress of the opening, the warnings from Pendergast... But right now she was too tired and exhausted to feel any fear. All she wanted to do was go home, double-lock the door, and crawl into bed. Instead, she had to endure hours of speechifying, mingling, and forced gaiety.

Menzies placed a gentle hand on her shoulder. "When this is all over, I'd like you to take a week's vacation. You deserve it."

"Thanks. I wish I could begin now."

"Three more hours."

Nora held up her glass. "Three more hours," she said, and took another gulp of champagne.

A string ensemble struck up Haydn's
Emperor
Quartet as the crowd began to move toward the food tables. They were loaded with blini
au caviar,
prosciutto, rare French and Italian cheeses, mounds of crusty baguettes, crudites, fresh oysters on beds of crushed ice, cold lobster tails, smoked sturgeon-the works. Other tables groaned with wines and champagne, and every third person seemed to be a waiter rushing about with a silver tray loaded with drinks and food.

"Nora," said Menzies, "you must circulate."

She groaned. "God help me."

"Come on. We'll face the ravening hordes together." He took her arm and they began making their way slowly through the crowd. Nora found that she was greeted at every turn by congratulators, peppered with questions from the press. Her stunt with the Tanos had apparently gone down exceptionally well, everyone assuming it had been long planned.

When at length she returned to their assigned table, she found that several other members of the department were there, including Ashton, the show's chief curator. As the serious eating got under way, Collopy, flanked by his young wife, mounted the podium and gave a short, witty speech.

Then it was time for the cutting of the ribbon. Nora, Menzies, Ashton, and a few other curators lined up at the podium while Collopy, wielding the gigantic pair of scissors used for such occasions, went to the ribbon and made a hash of trying to cut it. When it was finally accomplished, a cheer went up and the huge doors leading to the Sacred Images exhibition swung open. Smiling and nodding, Menzies, Nora, and the rest of the Anthropology Department led the way, the partygoers following in an excited crush behind.

It took about half an hour to reach the far end of the hall, propelled along by the mass of people behind them. Nora felt a shudder as she passed through the room Margo had been murdered in, but, of course, all trace of the crime scene had been removed and nobody but her even seemed aware of it. As she moved farther and farther beyond the scene of the murder, Nora felt the horror replaced by a quiet sense of pride. She could hardly believe they'd managed to pull it off.

Menzies stayed close beside her, occasionally murmuring compliments on the cases she had curated or arranged. The Tanos had come and gone, leaving some bits of turquoise, pollen, and cornmeal on the top of the mask case, which everybody took care to leave in place. At last, when they reached the final hall, Menzies turned to Nora and bowed.

"I do believe we have done our duty." He smiled, face twinkling. "And now you may beat a discreet retreat home. I, unfortunately, have some work to do upstairs in my office. Let's talk next week about that vacation I owe you."

He bowed again and Nora, with relief, turned to make her way to the nearest exit-and home.

FIFTY-ONE

 For perhaps the fiftieth time in the last two days, Larry En derby had made up his mind to quit, get the hell out of the museum.

It wasn't enough that he worked in a windowless basement room in the Museum of Natural History, the spookiest damn place in all of New York City. He couldn't get the horror of what he'd found two days ago out of his head. They hadn't even given him a frigging day off, offered him counseling, or even thanked him. It was like he didn't count. It was like
she
didn't count, the way they just moved right ahead with the exhibition as if nothing had happened.

Margo Green. He didn't know her well, but she'd gone out of her way to be nice to him the few times they'd met. Which was more than he could say for most of the curators and all the administrators. It was just the way the museum treated everybody below a certain level: hired help.

But, if he could admit it to himself, Enderby was mainly disgruntled because the museum had chosen this exact time-during the biggest party in five years-to switch over yet
another
museum hall to the new security system. So, instead of scarfing down caviar and champagne with the beautiful people two flights up, they were down there in the basement once again, toiling over software subroutines.

Sure, they'd been invited to the party, like everyone else in the museum. That just added insult to injury.

He rolled back from the computer console with an exaggerated sigh.

"Holding up?" Walt Smith, project manager for the museum's security upgrade, asked from behind a nearby monitoring screen.

Smitty had been unusually gentle since Enderby's discovery, two days before. Everyone was tiptoeing around him, like somebody had died in his family.

"How about a short break to check out the party?" Enderby asked him. "I wouldn't mind a few of those cocktail shrimp."

Smitty shook his head. He held a BlackBerry in one hand and a cell phone in the other. "I don't think that's going to be possible, Larry. Sorry."

"Come on, Smitty," Jim Choi, the software engineer, said from the far side of the diagnostic display unit. "Just give us half an hour. You'd be surprised how many shrimp I can ingest in half an hour. The party's almost over, they'll run out of food soon."

"You know we can't alter the schedule. The Astor Hall's just like any other, one more on the list. What, we're going to sneak the hands of the atomic clock back five minutes, maybe nobody will notice?" Smitty laughed at his own miserable joke.

Choi rolled his eyes. Smitty was not known for his rapier-like wit.

Enderby watched the goatee on Smith's chin waggle up and down as he laughed. It was a straggly little thing, seemingly attached by only a few hairs, and Enderby half hoped it might fall off one of these days. Despite Enderby's general irritation, he had to admit Smitty wasn't a bad guy to work for. He'd worked his way up through the ranks and, despite being only thirty-five, was as Old Museum as they came. A real stickler, relatively humorless, but as long as you were a conscientious worker and did your job, he looked out for you. It wasn't Smitty's fault the museum bigwigs were demanding that the new security system be fully installed and operational, yesterday.

Smitty stood up and walked across the room, past racks of computer workstations and servers, to a bank of six dozen small CCTV monitors mounted in the far wall. Most of the monitors showed black-and-white still lifes of empty museum hallways and display cases. Half a dozen in the lower right corner, however-the video feeds from the Hall of the Heavens, where the opening party was going on-were a riot of movement. From his terminal, Enderby watched the little images dance and jitter their way across the screen with a heavy heart. Upstairs, the museum's slope-shouldered, mouth-breathing curators were rubbing elbows with starlets and nymphets; and here he was, toiling in this cave like some troglodyte. True, it could be worse-he could be working in the "Pit," the museum's Central Security Office, which was twice as large but unpleasantly hot and crammed full of even more screens and keyboards than this Advanced Technology Center. Worse, but not much worse.

Smitty was squinting at his BlackBerry. "Okay, set to initialize the final test?"

Nobody replied.

"I'll take that as a yes." He turned back to his console, tapped briefly on the keyboard. "Astor Hall," he intoned, "final fail-safe test of the security upgrade, January 28, 8:28 p.m."

Jeez, he always makes it sound like it's Mission Control in here,
Enderby thought. He glanced over at Jim Choi, who once again rolled his eyes.

"Larry, what's the status of the legacy system?" Smitty asked.

"Looks good."

"Jim, give me an update on the laser grid in the Astor Hall."

A brief tapping of keys. "Ready to go," Choi said.

"Then let's run the low-level diagnostics."

There was a brief silence as both Smitty and Choi ran independent tests. Enderby, whose job was to monitor the behavior of the preexisting security system as the updated laser security system was brought online, stared at his monitor. This was probably the fortieth hall they'd converted to the new system. And for each conversion, there were a hundred steps to perform: on-site analysis, system architecture, coding, installation ... He could be making three times his salary in some slick start-up in Palo Alto, with stock options to boot. And he probably wouldn't stumble over any bodies in the middle of the night, either.

Smitty looked up from his keyboard. "Jim, what's your checksum?"

"It's 780E4F3 hex."

"I concur. Let's proceed." Smitty picked up a phone, dialed.

Enderby watched without interest. He knew Smitty was calling the boys in the Pit, giving them a heads-up that the switchover was about to happen, just a reminder in case some newbie went apeshit when he saw the hiccup on their screens. It was always the same. The old system would be disabled; there would be a ninety-second period in which the new system was initialized and the "handshake" performed; then a final twenty-minute test of the new system would follow, to ensure the installation was correct and that it had been brought online successfully. Twenty minutes in which they had nothing to do but twiddle their thumbs. Then, at last, the new system would become fully operational and the old system put in backup mode. He fetched a huge yawn. As he did so, his stomach grumbled unhappily.

"Central Security?" Smitty was saying into the phone. "Who is this, Carlos? Hey, it's Walt Smith in ATC. We're activating the lasers in the Astor Hall. We'll be initializing in about five minutes. Right. I'll call back once the handshake's complete."

He put the phone down, then looked back at Enderby. "Hey, Larry," he said gently.

"What?"

"Just how much time did Choi there say he needed to consume that trawler-load of shrimp?"

"I told you," Choi piped up. "Thirty minutes."

Smitty leaned forward, resting his arm on the console. "Tell you what. If we can get this initialization done and the twenty-minute test phase started, I'll give you fifteen.
Including
the time it'll take us to get there and back again."

Enderby sat up. "On the level?"

Smitty nodded.

Choi grinned widely. "You just purchased yourself a boy."

"Good. Then let's see how fast we can get through this checklist." And Smitty turned back to his terminal.

FIFTY-TWO

Hugo Menzies inserted his key into the staff elevator and rode it from the second to the fifth floor. Exiting the elevator, he strolled meditatively down the long, polished corridor. The curatorial offices lay on either side: old oaken doors with panels of frosted glass, each bearing the name of a curator in old-fashioned gold-leaf lettering, even those most recently appointed. Menzies smiled, already feeling a nostalgia for the old pile and its quaint traditions.

He paused before his own office door, opened it, and entered just long enough to pick up the canvas satchel that accompanied him almost everywhere. Then he closed and locked the door and continued his stroll to the farthest end of the hall, where there was an unmarked door. He unlocked it, stepped into the stairwell beyond, descended two flights, and exited into a dark, deserted hall-the Hall of Northwest Coast Indians. It was one of the oldest halls in the museum, a true gem of late-nineteenth-century museology, and it smelled of old cedar and smoke. Transformation masks, totem poles, slate bowls gleamed in the dark recesses. Menzies paused to inhale the air with delight. Then he walked briskly through the deserted hall and several others, finally arriving at a large metal door bearing the legend
The Astor Hall of Diamonds.

His eye dwelled lovingly on the door in all its brushed-steel splendor, taking special note of the two video cameras on either side, staring down at him like beady black eyes-except, as he knew, they were currently not functioning. He smiled again, then removed a large round watch from his vest pocket and gazed at it. Although in shape it resembled a pocket watch, it was, in fact, a modern digital stopwatch. On its face, numbers were counting down with enormous rapidity, at an accuracy to the thousandths of a second.

The watch was reading time signals from the same satellite that the museum's security system used.

He waited until the watch signaled a certain point in time with a soft beep. Menzies immediately put the watch away, stepped rapidly to the door, placed his ear against it, and then quickly swiped a magnetic card through the reader. The door did not open; instead, a small eye-level window shot open, revealing a retinal optical scanner.