The Murder in the Museum of Man (9 page)

“Raul Brauer,” I said, “the expert on early Polynesia?” A sick excitement began within me. “I thought he had retired, had moved out there.”

Lotte snorted. “That old goat.”

Izzy held his drink up to the light, sipped and nodded, and said, “He still gets back here. He has a house of sorts out beyond the bypass.”

“Really,” I said, keeping my voice low, “you don’t believe all that stuff about that … cult?”

Lotte smiled, and Izzy regarded me over his half-moon spectacles with a skeptical, knowing gaze. “That, Norman, is the conventional wisdom, based on the dubious assumption that some things are too grotesque to be true. I’ve always thought there was more to the Brauer cult than fantastical rumors.”

I sipped my drink again and found in its clashing taste something that appealed to me. I glanced around at the genteel furnishings of the Club — the glassy chandeliers hanging from the corbel-edged ceiling, the glinting brass sconces on the fleur-de-lis wallpaper between the oil portraits of distinguished, long-gone personages, the layerings of linen on tables, on side tables, and on the arms of waiters, the well-groomed men and women talking and dining, and the heavy drapes swagged back to show it all richly reflected in the windows, as though part of the darkness beyond. It is one thing to entertain theoretical doubts about colleagues, it is quite another to have the force of real suspicion fall on one like a hammer blow. I shook my head. “No, Izzy, not in academia.”

He merely smiled at me and murmured, “You have the gift of innocence, Norman.”

I have had to return to the office to pick up my house keys, and as I sit here in the quiet (Mort just checked in to see if everything was all right), I have been brooding about Raul Brauer. Come to think of it, I have seen him around lately. He’s unmistakable, being a tall, heavyset man with a massive, voluptuously bald head and the pale, staring eyes of a predator. I never got to know him beyond the conventional pleasantries, and though getting long in the tooth now, he still moves with the aggressive, forward-leaning stride of a younger man. His museum office was directly under mine when he was curator of the Oceanic Collections. Back in the late sixties and early seventies, he achieved some small fame as a proponent of what he called “re-creational” experimentation in anthropological research. The role of the anthropologist, he contended, involves more than just digging up objects and analyzing the past; he must try as well to comprehend it in all its living aspects through a vigorous re-creation of life patterns, including rituals, food, tools, and art forms.

He is an authority on the life and rituals of the Rangu, a tribe occupying the beautiful island of Loa Hoa in the Marquesas group. The area figures prominently in the founding of the museum and was the locus of the Schortle Expedition in 1892, the museum’s first serious collecting/research venture. Schortle returned with vivid accounts of the loose amorous arrangements among the Rangu, their predilection for sporadic warfare with neighboring tribes, their taste for what they called long pig, and the ease with which they cultivated breadfruit (whatever they are). I remember vaguely a
National Geographic
article devoted to Brauer’s work at a site far up one of the deeply clefted valleys that divide the island. There was a picture of him in a loincloth, his torso heavily tattooed, as he instructed several graduate students in some native custom with the help of a local chief. In
some quarters he was dismissed as a charlatan. But that could have been academic pique at the amount of publicity he was garnering for his work and for himself. He used his so-called methodology, it was said, to recruit his graduate students, including several young females, for participation in a dance that included public copulation and culminated in a general free-for-all. More disturbing was the persistent rumor that, during one of these expeditions, Brauer and his understudies got carried away with their methodology to the point where they sacrificed one of those hapless, unaffiliated types that show up out of nowhere and volunteer at digs. The rumor has it they not only sacrificed this young man but cut him up and ate him, according to the custom of the Rangu. There has been talk over the years of a Brauer cult, maintained by him and his students who were present at the alleged murder and cannibalism. They meet, supposedly, and do things that cults do. I have never subscribed to the rumor myself. It strikes me as apocryphal, one of those tasteless jokes that gets started around the campfire and takes on a life of its own. Besides, I can’t imagine academics letting something like that go by without someone, somewhere, publishing a paper on it.

Now I have my doubts. Now I have my suspicions. But suspicions, however compelling, are not proof. I will need to do some digging, to go into the archives and go over the original files of those expeditions.

Well, on other matters, quickly, before I take my yawning self home to bed. My e-mail has certainly been busy of late. I arrived this morning to find a note from Oliver Scrabbe announcing that he has established himself in the late dean’s office and will be meeting with each of us individually “to bring us up to date on the consolidation process.” It would seem that for him the takeover of the museum is a foregone conclusion. I was tempted to write him (I never use the e-mail, it seems so ephemeral) a
response pointing out that a final decision had yet to be made but decided against it, at least for the moment.

I walked this morning through a bird-loud world enveloped in a veil of gauzy verdure of just-leafing trees prinked here and there with the pinks of the blossoming cherries and the unequivocal yellow of forsythia, which is common as blue jays and quite as beautiful. From the woodland path I saw on the shore of the pond a pair of Canada geese with a brood of tawny puffball goslings. Being a voyeur of nature, I stopped to admire them, the scene so affecting I could understand why a painter or a poet would want to grasp and hold it with the delicate, powerful grip of his art. These noble creatures mate for life. That way, we are told by naturalists, they don’t have to spend valuable time and energy on yearly courtship rituals. But is it not possible, I have often wondered, that they simply fall in love?

Ah well, despite such a beginning, my natural ebullience withered as soon as I crossed the Lagoon Bridge and the museum came into sight. What heretofore had been a cause of delight — the view of five stories of elegant brick rising above the blush of budding sycamores on Belmont Avenue — filled me with boding instead. I suffered the awful presentiment that Cranston Fessing’s killer was not merely in the Museum of Man but of it, an endemic sickness, part of our killer genes.

It didn’t help to find that Lieutenant Tracy had called. I tried to call him back, but he wasn’t available. I don’t know why it should make me nervous that he called. I know I am innocent, at least of Fessing’s murder.

Indeed, as part of my own investigation of that murder I went down to the archives in search of the files of Raul Brauer’s expeditions to Loa Hoa in the late sixties and early seventies. Imagine my surprise, my foreboding, my excitement, to find the whole section missing! I summoned Mrs. Walsh, the archivist, a woman notorious for her lack of organization, and she could give me no satisfactory answer as to where they might be. They could be out on loan, she said, with the incipient panic of the naturally disorganized, rummaging around her cluttered desk. I signed out some files on the early history of the museum, calmed Mrs. Walsh into a state of coherence, and asked her would she, with utmost discretion, make inquiries for me as to what happened to the materials from the Brauer expeditions.

I returned to my office in a perturbed state of suspicion. I could understand if, say, one or two of the files had been missing. Or, say, if some legitimate researcher had signed them out in good order. Or had they been misfiled, perhaps under Polynesia or Oceania. They belong, rightfully, in the extensive Marquesan section, which is arranged chronologically. But they were simply gone. I am loath to raise a ruckus about the matter because to do so might alert certain parties that I am on to their game. And quite aside from not wanting to tip my hand, I do not look forward in the least to sharing Dean Fessing’s fate.

My state of mind wasn’t helped much to find another of those anonymous messages from the Genetics Lab in my e-mail.

I’m not sure what to make of it as there have been so many grumbles and rumbles and rumors coming out of the lab over the past couple of years. Marge Littlefield has told me that ever since Professor Gottling and Onoyoko Pharmaceuticals established an independent institute within the Genetics Lab the place has been running virtually on its own, institutionally ducking, so to speak, behind the MOM or behind Wainscott, as suits its purposes. I’ve printed the communication out and clipped it into my Fessing notebook, though how any of this fits into a larger paradigm of suspicion is beyond me at present. The assumption
of university control over the museum would entail the same for the lab and the Primate Pavilion followed by some rigorous and perhaps retroactive oversight and regulation. A motive, perhaps, for doing away with the dean? But why all the
haute cuisine?
Is the culinary aspect part of an elaborate smoke screen or an attempt to embarrass a university all too sensitive to its public image? How might all this fit in with the Brauer cult? Why do I sense in this whole affair a mad imagination at work? Or am I letting my own imagination, fired by suspicion, run away with me?

Well, to change the subject completely, I’ve often wondered what our children would have been like had Elsbeth and I ever married. I mean, we were something of a contrast, perhaps even a mismatch: she is scarcely five feet and I am well over six. I was and remain quite lean, and she, alas, always quite generously endowed, has gotten a tad plump since marrying, although I haven’t seen her in fifteen years, not since that disastrous visit I made to Philadelphia. And while I am pale eyed, blond, and thinning on top, with a nose of Roman dimensions, Elsbeth has dark, alluring eyes, lustrous, nearly black hair, and generally pretty if somewhat blunt features. I imagine the boys would have had my long legs and slender frame. Of course, they could have turned out short and stocky, like Elsbeth, while the girls, had we any, might have gangled like me. Or perhaps something in between. One of them surely would have had my mother’s russet coloring, the strawberry redness of her hair tingeing so delicately the features of her face. Poor Mother never quite approved of Elsbeth. “Don’t you think she’s a bit
common?”
she once said to me. “I mean, her father is a car dealer.” Mother, I’m afraid, was a bit common herself, common, I mean, in her consideration of social standing. And a bit mad as she got on. She didn’t want me to marry Elsbeth or anyone else for that matter, but she did complain in her dotage of not having grandchildren. I told her you couldn’t have one without the other, not in those days
anyway. These days it happens, I’m told, even among respectable people, as we slide back toward some state of nature. I suppose it won’t be long before people start coupling in public, like dogs.

Speaking of which, I mustn’t forget the first of the Oversight Committee meetings on the Paleolithic diorama is set for Thursday. Thad Pilty came in late this afternoon to ask me to sit in on the meetings and record them. He can be quite disarming when he wants to be, but there was a disingenuous note in his voice, a kind of false confiding when he told me that “political considerations” had prompted him to agree to the committee’s request for the hearings. He said, his eyes not really meeting mine, that in the wake of what happened to Dean Fessing he felt any resistance to the committee’s request would be seen in the wrong light. Still, had he followed my advice, contained in a memorandum sent to Dr. Commer and copied to him, the issue might have been limited to the legitimacy of the committee’s purview, rather than the form and content of his precious diorama. At the very least the issue would have been the venue. But Professor Pilty conceded even that, and the hearings are to be held in the Twitchell Room.