The Bone Vault - Linda Fairstein (2 page)

I could tell that Nina was annoyed with me, as she tried to follow me back down the steps.

"Who's Augustus? What the hell are you talking about? The temple is Egyptian, right?"

I had been coming to the Met since my earliest childhood, and knew most of the permanent exhibits pretty well. "Half right. It was built near Aswan, but by a Roman emperor who ruled that region at the time. Augustus had it erected in honor of two young sons of a Nubian chieftain who drowned in the Nile. I hate to dampen your enthusiasm, Nina. I've just been around too much death today not to wonder why we find it appropriate to organize our festivities in and around the tombs of all these ancient cultures. Wouldn't people find it offensive to have the next cocktail party at Arlington Cemetery?"

"Sorry they're not serving scotch tonight, Alex. Take it easy, will you? We can leave any time you'd like. Who's the old dame hanging on to Jake?"

He had spotted the two of us and was making his way to the foot of the platform on which we stood. A silver- haired woman with lots of dangling sapphires--from earlobes, wrists, fingers--had grasped Jake by the arm and was bending his ear about something. I stopped on the bottom step and fished in my purse for some coins to toss in the moat.

"Look out for that crocodile, darling. The most dangerous creature in Egypt, the embodiment of the essence of evil." Jake held out his hand to lower me down as I tossed a few quarters in the water, for good luck. The ebony croc mocked the gesture, his gaping mouth posed for eternity, seeking something meatier than the quiche that was being circulated around the room.

I kissed Jake's cheek, which was already covered with the shapes of pursed lips in a variety of colors. "I don't mind that you'rein loco husband for Nina, but who's the rest of my competition?"

"That last woman? Just one of the trustees. Didn't catch her name. Gushing about how exciting the joint show is going to be and asking whether the networks are covering the fireworks tonight."

"Fireworks?"

"There's supposed to be a preview, a five-minute sound-and-light show to kick off the news about the bestiary exhibition. Here comes Thibodaux. He'll do the honors."

Instead, the director walked straight toward us, smoothing his jacket with one hand and his hair with the other. "Nina, may I have a word with you? Do you know where Quentin is?"

"I'll find him for you. Pierre, I'd like you to meet my--"

"Enchant�."He greeted us tersely but his eyes searched the room over my shoulder. He and Nina broke away, retracing our steps to look for the producer.

I glanced at my watch. "Soon as we tear her loose, think you'd treat your two dates to burgers at `21'?"

"My chariot awaits you, madam."

Nina, Quentin, and Pierre had their heads together at the top of the stairs. The director did a double take over his shoulder as Quentin pointed down at me. Nina was shaking her head in the negative and trying to block me from Quentin's line of sight. You're right, pal. Whatever it is, keep me out of it.

Pierre Thibodaux didn't wait for the others to descend the two tiers of steps.

"Miss Cooper? Mr. Vallejo just told me that you're a prosecutor. May I have a moment with you, alone, for some advice? Do you mind, Mr. Tyler?" This time, no guard admonished us as Thibodaux led me back up to the platform, removed the rope between the two pillars at the entrance of the Temple of Dendur, and stepped into the quiet archway.

"You're a bureau chief in the Manhattan district attorney's office? I need your help in dealing with the police tonight."

"Here, at the museum?"

"No, actually, in a freight yard. I'm going to make a few remarks to close the evening and send all these people on their way. We'll forgo the drama of the UniQuest Productions pyrotechnics. The last thing we need tomorrow is any bad publicity linked to our splendid new show."

"Perhaps I can make a call to the proper--"

"There's a shipment of exhibits going abroad, stored in containers for transit. It's a very routine occurrence for us. Crates go in and out of the country all the time. Exchanges with other museums, items we've deaccessioned or loaned to foreign institutions. Happens regularly." "I doubt there's anything that I can help you with. If you've got a problem with Customs--" I said, as Thibodaux continued to speak over my objection.

"What doesn't usually happen is that one of the ancient sarcophagi was opened for inspection a few hours ago. There was supposed to be a mummified princess in the coffin, Miss Cooper. Twelfth Dynasty, Middle Kingdom. A couple of thousand years old and quite valuable. Instead, there's a corpse inside. Someone has substituted a body, I'm afraid. A few centuries younger than my princess, no doubt, but just as dead."

2

Rust-colored steel containers, each the size of a boxcar on a freight train, were stacked by the dozens and lined up in rows for acre after acre in the dark shipyard. Pierre Thibodaux's limousine was stopped at the gate by a night watchman, who flashed his beam at the two of us in the backseat. Thibodaux's French accent was lost on the weary sentry, who was probably coming to the end of his shift as the hour approached midnight.

"Say what?"

"We are here to meet some people from the Metropolitan Museum, somewhere in--"

I leaned forward and folded back the leather cover on my wallet, holding my gold and blue badge under the nose of the guard. "I'm Alexandra Cooper, district attorney's office. There are some detectives inside the yard who are waiting for us."

I checked the rear page of the evening's program, on which I had scribbled down the location Mike Chapman had given to me when I called him from my cell phone fifteen minutes earlier. "They're in front of lot G-eight. Which way is that?"

The watchman pressed the buzzer that unlocked the chain-link fence and pointed his finger, illuminated by the lighted end of his cigarette. "Go to your left, couple of hundred yards. Can't miss the big oranges on the side of the stack of Tropicana containers. Hang a right and drive in past them. Your cops are already there."

The fact that the freight yard happened to be across the river from Manhattan in Newark, New Jersey, hadn't put Chapman off in the least. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey had control of the property, so he figured it was worth his time to explore the situation. Any fears that my New York County identification would not serve to get us inside were short-lived.

The Lincoln Town Car glided like a swan among the huge, awkward metal bins, piled high and patiently awaiting shipment to myriad destinations around the world. It came to a stop against the rear of a tractor trailer truck, which was parked between two containers, and had a ramp rolled up into its gaping end.

Thibodaux was out of the car before the driver shut the engine off. I saw Mike approach and introduce himself to the director, on his way over to help me out of the car.

"Lon Chaney coming, too, or can we get right to work?"

He took my hand and I climbed out onto the graveled roadway, grateful that Nina had borrowed my gown and left me wearing a black satin pantsuit. After I had called Mike at home and asked him to meet me here, I sent her off to dinner with Jake.

"Who's the frog?"

"New director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He got the call about this in the middle of a reception he was having tonight. Asked my advice about what to do when he learned the body had been found. It took a while to make him understand that reporting the fact was not optional. He's hoping this is a story that won't have legs." I shook my head.

"Cleopatra taking the big sleep in Port Newark? Probably worth only eight or nine days of tabloid headlines."

"Who's here, besides you and Lenny?"

"The two suits are museum flunkies. They're the ones that got the call from the truck driver, just before six o'clock. Came out to see for themselves before they screamed for the big cheese. The trucker is sitting in the cab, finishing his hero and listening to the ball game. Extra innings, Yanks and Red Sox all tied up after ten. Your boy Pettitte pitched great the first seven innings. Joe should never have taken him out. The two square-badges are security for the shipyard. It's their dog that sniffed out the stiff."

Square-badges was police slang for civilian guards hired by private businesses, shopping malls to shipyards.

"Where is she?"

Mike's back was to the truck, and he pumped his thumb over his shoulder. "Up the ramp. Resting comfortably in the care of Tri-State Transit."

"Never unloaded?"

"Nope. Routine is they start hauling the goods off the truck as soon as they drive into the yard. Most of the items are packed inside wooden crates, labeled and ready for overseas shipping. Truckers set them down on the ground, and then they're winched over into containers that get loaded onto the freighters for transport. Whole place looks like my Lionel train set on steroids."

I looked around at the endless rows of giant boxes, towering over us and stretching in every direction as far as I could see.

"Once they're out of the truck, security has the dogs smell around them, incoming and outgoing. Looking for drugs or dead bodies. Back in the nineties, there were an embarrassing number of incidents out here. Wise guys were using the yard as a wide-open warehouse for cocaine storage and a staging area for shipping nose candy everywhere in Europe you could imagine."

"Jersey police? Port Authority cops?"

"Not involved yet. That's why the square-badges. Shippers worked out a compromise that the owners of these lots would hire their own patrols. Only call in the cops when they got a crime."

"I think I'm getting what they call mixed signals here. Thibodaux believes there's a corpse in the sarcophagus that doesn't belong there. That's why I called you to meet us out here. Isn't there a crime in this?"

"Lucky Pierre might be right. But the mopes who found Cleo have seen too many mummy movies. Curse of the Pharaohs and all that crap. They cracked open the crate, but then the lid was so heavy they could barely move it. Took four of them to lift it just a couple of inches--expecting to find a stash of white powder--but one guy sees a head sticking through some dangling pieces of linen instead. Dropped the stone so fast I'm surprised it didn't splinter into a million pieces."

"So they never bothered to call the Jersey authorities?"

"They're afraid to open the box up again. Think they're doomed to the fate of Lord Carnavon if it turns out to be an actual mummy and they disturb it. They called the museum and got switched over to the curator in charge of Egyptian art. He's the tall, bald guy talking to your buddy Pierre. The rent-a-cops told him that if he wants to know what made the dog howl, he better get his own ass out here and have a look inside."

"And the other one in the business suit?"

"The heavyset one in the middle is in charge of the shipping department. He's responsible for the whole load that came out on the truck. The two of 'em are sweating up a storm. That's more excitement than they've had in any museum since Murf the Surf made off with the crown jewels."

"Why's she still on the truck?"

"'Cause once the crates are down to two rows per stack, they just walk the dog onto the ramp and let him cruise around before they do all the work of unloading. Saves time and aggravation in case they have to seize a truck or ship something back to its place of origin. Rin Tin Tin was frothing at the mouth when he hit the crate with the body."

Pierre Thibodaux took a piece of paper from the hand of the shipping manager and walked back over to talk to us. "I don't understand how this could have happened, Mr. Chapman. We've got a state-of-the-art security system at the Met, as you might imagine. Billions of dollars' worth of paintings and sculptures, priceless masterpieces. It's...it's inconceivable--" "Slow down. Let's work this backwards. Is this your tractor trailer?"

Thibodaux looked at the tracking order in his hand and then back to the truck, to check the lettering on its side. "This is one of our contractors. We own a number of vans, of course, since we're constantly moving pieces about. But on many of the larger jobs like this," he said, gesturing around him at the dozens of cartons that had come off the back end, "we hire out the work to companies like Tri-State."

"Common carrier," I said quietly to Mike.

"What's that got to do with anything?"

"Just hold the thought, Detective. I'll connect the dots for you later on."

He turned back to Thibodaux. "So there's no question but that this mother lode left the Met early today?"

The director handed me the receipt he had just taken from the shipping manager. Mike aimed a flashlight on the wrinkled paper, which was stamped with today's date: Tuesday, May 21, 10:43A.M.

"Was the whole shipment from the museum, or did the driver stop anywhere else along the way to pick up or drop off other crates?"

"No, we keep a pretty tight financial rein on things like this. Mr. Lissen, he's the fellow over there who runs the department, knows the dimensions of the trucks we rent. And he's got the measurements of all the lots going out. Makes a point of trying to fill them as full as he can, so we get our money's worth."

"How do you inventory the contents?"

"An age-old system, Mr. Chapman." Thibodaux was rubbing his brow as he stepped back to lean against the adjacent container. "We've got more than two million objects at the Met, and the moment one arrives it's assigned a number. An accession number."

"Hey, Lenny," Mike yelled to the detective he'd brought to Newark with him, who had his notepad out, talking to the truck driver. "Wanna gown up, hike up that ramp, and check something for me?"

Thibodaux looked up at us again. "The very first work of art to enter the Met's collection back in 1870 was a coffin. Ironic, isn't it? The Garland Sarcophagus. Roman marble, from the third centuryB.C . Every employee at the museum knows that. Item number 70.1. The first gift acquired in 1870, the year we were founded.

"Anyway, Mr. Chapman, that's the system. After 1970, all four digits of the year were used, followed by the order in which the piece came into the collection."