Relic

She wondered about the parents of the two little boys. They must have had high hopes for their children, too, she thought. Now, they’ll never know disappointment. Or happiness. Then her thoughts moved to Prine. And the blood on his shoes.

She got up and turned on more lights. Time to start di

The telephone rang. Automatically, she picked it up.

“Hello,” she said. She listened for a moment. “Oh. Hello, Mother.”

= 12 =

Night came early to the Museum of Natural History. As five o’clock neared, the early spring sun was already setting. Inside, the crowds began to thin. Tourists, schoolchildren, and harried parents streamed down the marble staircases toward the exits. Soon the echoes and shouts and clatter of footsteps in the vaulted halls died away. One by one, the exhibit cases went dark, and as the night wore on, the remaining lights threw crazed shadows across the marble floors.

A lone guard wandered along a hall, making his rounds, swinging a long key chain and humming. It was the begi

The whole joint gives me the creeps, he thought. Look at that son of a bitch in there. Goddamn native shit. Who the hell would pay to look at this stuff? Half of it’s got curses on it, anyway.

The mask leered at him out of a dark case. He hurried [70] on to the next station, where he turned a key in a box. The box recorded the time: 10:23 P.M. As he moved into the next hall, he had the unsettling impression—as he had so often—that his echoing footfalls were being carefully duplicated by some unseen presence.

He came to the next station and turned the key. The box clicked, and registered 10:34 P.M.

It only took four minutes to get to the next station. That gave him six minutes for a toke.

He ducked into a stairwell, closing and locking the door behind him, and peered down toward the darkened basement, where another door opened to an interior courtyard. His hand went for the light switch at the top of the stairs, but then withdrew. No sense calling attention to himself. He gripped the metal handrail tightly as he crept downward. In the basement, he made his way along the wall until he felt a long horizontal handle. He pushed, and frigid night air streamed in. He wedged open the door and lit up a joint, inhaling the bitter smoke with pleasure as he leaned out into the courtyard. A thin light from the deserted cloister beyond gave a pale illumination to his movements. The faint hum of passing traffic, muffled by so many intervening walls, passages, and parapets, seemed to come from another planet. He felt, with relief, the warm rush of the ca

Halfway up the stairs, he heard the door slam shut below. He stopped, feeling a sudden chill. Had he left the door open? No. Shit, what if someone had seen him toke up? But they couldn’t have smelt the smoke, and in the dark, it would’ve looked just like a cigarette.

There was a strange, rotten odor in the air that had nothing to do with weed. But no light flicked on, no footstep sounded on the metal steps. He started up toward the landing above.

Just as he reached it, he sensed a swift movement on [71] the stairs behind him. He spun around, and a hard jerk on his chest shoved him backward against the wall. The last thing he saw were his shadowy entrails rolling and slipping down the stairs. After a moment, he stopped wondering where all that gore had suddenly come from.

= 13 =

Tuesday

Bill Smithback sat in a heavy chair, watching the sharp, angular figure of Lavinia Rickman behind her birchwood veneer desk, reading his rumpled manuscript. Two bright red fingernails tapped on the glossy finish. Smithback knew that the fingernail ditty did not bode well. A very gray Tuesday morning sat outside the windows.

The room was not a typical Museum office. The untidy stacks of papers, journals, and books that seemed a fixture in other offices were missing. Instead, the shelves and desk were decorated with knickknacks from around the world: a storyteller doll from New Mexico, a brass Buddha from Tibet, several puppets from Indonesia. The walls were painted light institutional green, and the room smelled of pine air freshener.

Additional curios were arranged on both sides of her desk, as formal and symmetrical as shrubs in a French garden: an agate paperweight, a bone letter opener, a Japanese netsuke. And in the center of the motif hovered Rickman herself, bent primly over the manuscript. The [73] swirled stiff orange hair, Smithback thought, didn’t go well with the green walls.

The tapping speeded, then slowed as Rickman turned the pages. Finally she flicked over the last page, gathered the loose sheets together, and squared them in the precise center of the desk.

“Well,” she said, looking up with a bright smile. “I have a few small suggestions.”

“Oh,” said Smithback.

“This section on Aztec human sacrifice, for example. It’s much too controversial.” She licked her finger daintily and found the page. “Here.”

“Yes, but in the exhibition—“

“Mr. Smithback, the exhibition deals with the subject tastefully. This, on the other hand, is not tasteful. It’s far too graphic.” She zipped a Magic Marker across his work.

“But it’s entirely accurate,” Smithback said, wincing inwardly.

“I am concerned with emphasis, not accuracy. Something can be entirely accurate but have the wrong emphasis, and thus give the wrong impression. Allow me to remind you that we have a large Hispanic population here in New York.”

“Yes, but how is this going to offend—”

“Moving on, this section on Gilborg simply must go.” She zipped another line across another page.

“But why—?”

She leaned back in her chair. “Mr. Smithback, the Gilborg expedition was a grotesque failure. They were looking for an island that did not exist. One of them, as you are so zealous in pointing out, raped a native woman. We were careful to keep all mention of Gilborg out of the exhibition. Now, is it really necessary to document the Museum’s failures?”

“But his collections were superb!” Smithback protested feebly.

“Mr. Smithback, I am not convinced that you [74] understand the nature of this assignment.” There was a long silence. The tapping began again. “Do you really think that the Museum hired you, and is paying you, to document failure and controversy?”

“But failure and controversy are part of science, and who’s going to read a book that—”

“There are many corporations that give money to the Museum, corporations that might very well be disturbed by some of this,” Mrs. Rickman interrupted. “And there are volatile ethnic groups out there, ready to attack, that might take strong exception.”

“But we’re talking about things that happened a hundred years ago, while—”

“Mr. Smithback!” Mrs. Rickman had only raised her voice a little, but the effect was startling. A silence fell. “Mr. Smithback, I must tell you quite frankly …” She paused, then stood up briskly and walked around the desk until she was standing directly behind the writer.

“I must tell you,” Mrs. Rickman continued, “that it seems to be taking you longer than I thought to come around to our point of view. You are not writing a book for a commercial publisher. To put it bluntly, we’re looking for the kind of favorable treatment you gave the Boston Aquarium in your previous—ahem—assignment.” She moved in front of Smithback, perching stiffly on the edge of the desk. “There are certain things we expect, and indeed, that we have a right to expect. They are—” she ticked them off on bony fingers.