The Murder in the Museum of Man (2 page)

Well, chagrin and all, I feel better already having made this account of the true situation. Indeed, I feel positively purged. And I’ve even worked up something of an appetite to take to the Club, where, I believe, the special tonight is poached salmon. I might try it, perhaps, with a
demi-bouteille
of that dry Graves I helped the Wine Committee select last month. Izzy Landes tells me it’s rather disappointing, but then Izzy can be finicky when it comes to wine.

It wasn’t easy, but I confronted Malachy Morin again today over the press assistant issue. He tried to dismiss me, saying we had already discussed it, but I persisted. I must say I was in something of a lather. I hate confrontation. It makes me nervous. It makes me angry and I am not one of those people who enjoy anger. But people like Mr. Morin respond to power, and anger is a kind of power. When he tried to tell me that the matter was closed, that he was busy — I’m not sure the man knows what the word means in any real sense — I said if we don’t discuss it here and now I will be obliged to take it to the Board. I then read him the
appropriate sections in the Rules of Governance, pointing out not only that my position is a constitutional one as far as the museum is concerned but that I report not to him but to the Board of Governors.

Well, after much blustering and standing and sitting, he acceded to my demand. He said he would put a notice in the Seaboard
Bugle
for a press assistant and promised to have someone onboard within two weeks. I refrained from pointing out that he might consider doing the work himself instead of adding to the bureaucracy (the new assistant will no doubt need an assistant before long) because he grew so effusive, saying that he would henceforth regard me as part of his “management team.” In this spirit I agreed to help him interview candidates for the position. I said I would also be available to help advise him or her, probably the latter, given the man’s propensities. In the meanwhile I am to continue “handling the press.”

Marge Littlefield, the comptroller of the MOM and a dear friend of many years (she always saves me a dance or two at the Curatorial Ball), told me afterwards, when I related the meeting to her, that I am not to trust Mr. Morin in the least. She recounted for me a set-to they had had not long after he assumed virtual control of the administration of the museum through his rigged executive committee. She said he asked her in so many words to “cook the books,” i.e., spread the expenses of his office around the other departments, especially the tabs he runs up dining out and traveling to see things like the “Super Bowl,” whatever that is. He also caused a stir down in Purchasing when he said he wanted to “vet” certain suppliers. (The finances of the MOM are becoming quite warped enough with allocations from the Onoyoko Institute.) Well, Marge was having none of it, of course, and she told him so. When he began to insist, she told him in no uncertain terms that if he persisted she would feel obliged to report his requests to Dr. Commer with carbons to the
members of the Board of Governors. And that, according to Marge, made him change his tune immediately. He said that she had misunderstood him, that he really wanted her advice on budget matters, where, he pretended to confess, his experience was limited. He also asked her to join his management team. Well, not long afterwards, she learned from a friend in the Wainscott administration that Mr. Morin had tried, through various reorganizing schemes, to have her position “integrated” out of existence. My little triumph, in short, is qualified with caution.

But it is still a triumph, and I find myself taking an almost irresponsible delight in it. It will be such a relief not to have to talk to the press about what the museum is doing, or rather not doing, to find Dean Fessing, whose disappearance grows more ominous with each passing day (not to mention what the rumor mills are churning out). It is futile to try to explain to members of the Fourth Estate that the museum is essentially doing nothing in the case other than cooperating to the utmost with the appropriate authorities, because museums as a rule are not equipped to find missing persons, our expeditions to uncover long-buried mummies or hominid remains notwithstanding. (And these individuals, you might say, are found but not missing.) I mean, how am I to know if foul play is involved or not? It would not surprise me at all if the man simply grew tired of being a dean. He certainly ran into a buzz saw of opposition around here. Perhaps he just
left
. It’s something I’ve contemplated myself, though not in any ultimate sense.

But what a pleasure it will be to tell Damon Drex that I will no longer be in a position to grant him an institutional imprimatur for his monkey business and that I am no longer the conduit for the media attention he so desperately craves. Ever since my appointment as press assistant, the man has grown positively chummy in his obsequiously aggressive way. I suppose I should
have disabused him right from the start of the strange notion that I am impressed by or interested in his “work” with the chimpanzees in his care. I have always considered the addition of the Primate Pavilion to the MOM — however muddled the affiliation — just after the Second World War a mistake for several reasons, not the least of which being that apes are animals: they belong to zoology, not to anthropology and certainly not to archaeology. (Thank God there’s a fine early-spring rain misting the air, or the beasts would be out in their yard sending up their usual clamor.) Nor have I ever cared for the pavilion as an institution. It looks jerry-built, and with its bars and drab laboratories and that smokestack that rises over its crematorium, it has always reminded me of those beastly German camps. Nor do I understand the cult of cuteness that attends these animals, what with their dull, brutish faces, their blighted eyes, their lank, mangy hair, their mocking antics and revolting exhibitionism. I mean, has not humanity spent millions of painful years evolving
up
from that state? Of course, when one thinks of those death camps, one wonders.

Again, in reviewing this entry into the Log, and glancing over the first one I made, I realize I must sound quite negative about the museum. Nothing could be further from the truth. I do not wish to complain. The fact is, I have spent a singularly happy professional life here at the MOM. While “Recording Secretary” may not sound like much, it is a position of considerable reach and responsibility when exercised as it was originally intended. At a small reception on the occasion of my twenty-fifth anniversary in this position, my good friend Izzy Landes raised a glass and dubbed me the Curator of the Curators, a sobriquet I have worn with pride ever since. Lately, in fact, I have been giving considerable thought to the possibility of writing the history of the museum. I think it’s time that someone told the story of this wonderful place, and to this end I have begun to locate and
collect the necessary records and materials. (I didn’t mention this when I met with Malachy Morin today, as he doesn’t strike me as someone who is interested in either the past or the future. I mean, how do you explain to someone like him the impulse to write history, to render an account for the judging God of future generations?)

The fact is, when I leave in the evenings, I almost never take the little rattling elevator at the end of the corridor; instead I walk the other way to the main core of the building, a glorious atrium that is lit from above during the day by a domed skylight of wrought-iron tracery worthy of Kew Gardens. There, starting with the Greco-Roman/Egyptian-Sumerian Collections on the fifth floor, I descend through the galleries that encircle and open onto the atrium. A rich hush emanates from the delicate potteries, ivory work, and silks of the Far East that take up much of the fourth floor. On the third, of course, is the cream of our justifiably famous collection from Oceania — the canoe, of course, but also the wood carvings, the jade-bladed weaponry, tapa cloth, the fabulous, grotesque masks. There I linger as well over the African display, the Kongo figurines, the incised wooded vessels of the Kuba, the Masai beadwork. The second floor is given over to the Americas, and our strength here, as even the most cursory visit will attest, is the pre-Columbian Mesoamerican display. I walk around each case, sometimes pausing to absorb the beauty of millennia, until I reach the ground floor, which undercuts the galleries. This floor comprises Neanderthal Hall, even though the material displayed here extends back some three and a half million years. Imagine that, three and a half million years! And we always think there is so little time. Most of the specimens are casts of what Professor Thad Pilty calls the usual lineup. There’s Lucy, of course, a gracile australopithecine lady little more than three feet tall, along with some of her robust cousins. There struts early man,
Homo habilis
, the first, perhaps, to fashion some of the
beautiful, bifaceted stone tools, the start, as some have said, of aesthetics.
Home erectus
, of course, and then
neanderthalensis
, who are represented by several heavy-browed models based on the Gerasimov reconstructions. I mean, here is the evidence, lovingly labeled and displayed, that where you find man, however primitive, you find art, proof that we are not merely creatures but creators, that we partake … Well, there goes the phone.

Oh, dear, dear. That was the Seaboard Police Department. Dean Fessing, or pieces of him, at any rate, has been found, and I must go.

I have just had the most awful day of my professional life. Poor Cranston Fessing, as I reported last night, has been found. Or rather, what remained of him was found yesterday afternoon next to a Dumpster behind Atwood Hall, the gender studies building.

I am not good at public relations. And, as though sensing it, the vultures of the press lost no time in descending on me. They came flapping down as if out of the sky with their scrawny necks and glistening faces. Or they loped right in, big jawed and brazen. I threw them what few bones I could (forgive me that, Cranston, wherever you may be, in whatever well-regulated heaven or hell deans go to for their final reward), but the Seaboard Police Department is keeping a tight lid on details.

And I was left virtually alone to deal with the situation. Everyone who might have helped quite simply disappeared. The Wainscott Public Relations Office, an entire floor of nice but very
nervous people over in Grope Tower (a suitably hideous erection of concrete and glass), referred all questions to the MOM on the pretext that the dean was on assignment here, was, for the current academic year, on official leave from the university. Someone over in Grope told Amanda Feeney, a reporter from the
Bugle
, who has already misquoted and misconstrued me twice on previous stories, that the dean had been cannibalized and that expertise in such matters resides here. Which may be true but is surely irrelevant. It’s clear that the university simply wanted to dissociate itself from the grisliness of what has happened. Malachy Morin was no help whatsoever; he had left by nine-thirty after bungling a phone call and acted, if you ask me, quite suspiciously. But then, he always acts suspiciously. I gave the press and the police his home number, not, I’m sure, that he was there. And when I tried to tell Dr. Commer the news, the poor man thought I was arranging for him to have lunch with the late dean. I did manage to gin up a press release, including a paragraph of boilerplate from President Twill’s office praising the dean in terms one usually finds in encomia to retired or deceased faculty and administrators.

I did take some small satisfaction in keeping certain details from the press. It appears that the dean, after having been murdered (presumably), was butchered and cooked quite expertly before being eaten (presumably). The coroner, Dr. P. M. Cutler — a familiar figure here at the MOM, having used for forensic purposes specimens from our considerable collection of human remains — took unseemly relish, I thought, in relating to me some of the details of the autopsy. Indeed, he sounded more like Rick Royick, the
Bugle’s
food critic, than a coroner. The dean’s buttocks, it appears, were baked with a cinnamon honey glaze; there was a veritable roast rack of dean, complete with those little paper caps, one of which the doctor kept twisting in his hand; there were (I am paraphrasing Dr. Cutler) medallions
of thigh dressed in a basil curry
beurre blanc
that had been served with a thyme-infused purée of white beans and black olives in a marinade of citrus and fennel; there was evidence of a
bourguignonne;
and the dean’s head, while intact, had been partially emptied, with gross violation to the foramen magnum, where traces of nutmeg were found. I must say that if the doctor was indulging in levity at my expense, it is a levity I find in the worst possible taste, and no pun is intended. But in fact, I believe he was being entirely serious. When I betrayed the least incredulity, he asked me if I wanted to see the evidence firsthand. I said no, thank you. It appears the remains had been ravaged by dogs (Seaboard still does not have a leash law) and perhaps raccoons, judging by gnaw marks on some of the bones.