Relic

[119] “So the crates were moved late last week,” Pendergast murmured, almost to himself. “Just prior to the killing of the two boys. What could the killer have been after?” Then he looked back at Cuthbert. “What did you say had been taken from the crates? Seed pods, was it?”

Cuthbert shrugged. “As I said, I’m not sure what they were. They looked like seed pods to me, but I’m no botanist.”

“Can you describe them?”

“It’s been years, I don’t really remember. Big, round, heavy. Rugose on the outside. Light brown color. I’ve only seen the inside of the crate twice, you understand; once when it first came back, and then last week, looking for Mbwun. That’s the figurine.”

“Where is the figurine now?” Pendergast asked.

“It’s being curated for the show. It should be on display already, we’re sealing the exhibition today.”

“Did you remove anything else from the box?”

“No. The figurine is the unique piece of the lot.”

“I would like to arrange to see it,” said Pendergast. Cuthbert shifted irritably on his feet. “You can see it when the show opens. Frankly, I don’t know what you’re up to. Why waste time on a broken crate when there’s a serial killer loose in the Museum and you chaps can’t even find him?”

Frock cleared his throat. “Margo, bring me closer, if you will,” he asked.

Margo wheeled him over to the crates. With a grunt he bent forward to scrutinize the broken boards.

Everyone watched.

“Thank you,” he said, straightening up. He eyed the group, one at a time.

“Please note that these boards are scored on the inside as well as the outside,” he said finally. “Mr. Pendergast, are we not making an assumption here?” he finally said.

“I never make assumptions,” replied Pendergast, with a smile.

“But you are,” Frock persisted. “All of you are [120] making an assumption—that some one, or some thing, broke into the crate.”

There was a sudden silence in the vault. Margo could smell the dust in the air, and the faint odor of excelsior.

And then Cuthbert began to laugh raucously, the sound swelling harshly through the chamber.

As they approached Frock’s office once again, the curator was unusually animated.

“Did you see that cast?” he said to Margo. “Avian attributes, dinosaurian morphology. This could be the very thing!” He could scarcely contain himself.

“But, Professor Frock, Mr. Pendergast believes it was constructed as a weapon of some sort,” Margo said quickly. As she said it, she realized that she wanted to believe it, too.

“Stuff!” Frock snorted. “Didn’t you get the sense, looking at that cast, of something tantalizingly familiar, yet utterly foreign? We’re looking at an evolutionary aberration, the vindication of my theory.” Inside the office, Frock immediately produced a notebook from his jacket pocket and started scribbling.

“But, Professor, how could such a creature—?” Margo stopped as she felt Frock’s hand close over hers. His grip was extraordinarily strong.

“My dear girl,” he said, “there are more things in heaven and earth, as Hamlet pointed out. It isn’t always for us to speculate. Sometimes we must simply observe.” His voice was low, but he trembled with excitement. “We can’t miss this opportunity, do you hear? Damn this steel prison of mine! You must be my eyes and ears, Margo. You must go everywhere, search up and down, be an extension of my fingers. We must not let this chance pass us by. Are you willing, Margo?”

He gripped her hand tighter.

= 19 =

The old freight elevator in Section 28 of the Museum always smelled like something had died in it, Smithback thought. He tried breathing through his mouth.

The elevator was huge, the size of a Manhattan studio, and the operator had decorated it with a table, chair, and pictures cut from the Museum’s nature magazine. The pictures focused on a single subject. There were giraffes rubbing necks, insects mating, a baboon displaying its rump, native women with pendulous breasts.

“You like my little art gallery?” the elevator man asked, with a leer. He was about sixty years old and wore an orange toupee.

“It’s nice to see someone so interested in natural history,” Smithback said sarcastically.

As he stepped out, the smell of rotting flesh hit him with redoubled force; it seemed to fill the air like a Maine fog. “How do you stand it?” he managed to gasp to the elevator man.

[122] “Stand what?” the man said, pausing as he rolled the hoistway doors shut.

A cheerful voice came ringing down the corridor. “Welcome!” An elderly man shouted over the sound of the forced-air ducts as he grasped Smithback’s hand. “Nothing but zebra cooking today. You miss the rhinoceros. But come in anyway, come in, please!” Smithback knew his thick accent was Austrian.

Jost Von Oster ran the osteological preparation area, the Museum Laboratory in which animal carcasses were reduced to bones. He was over eighty, but looked so pink, cheerful, and plump that most people thought he was much younger.

Von Oster had started at the Museum in the late twenties, preparing and mounting skeletons for display. His crowning achievement in those days had been a series of horse skeletons, mounted walking, trotting, and galloping. It was said that these skeletons had revolutionized the way animals were exhibited. Von Oster had then turned to creating the lifelike habitat groups popular in the forties, making sure every detail—down to the saliva on an animal’s mouth—looked perfectly real.

But the era of the habitat group had passed, and Von Oster had eventually been relegated to the Bug Room. Disdaining all offers of retirement, he cheerfully presided over the osteological lab, where animals—now mostly collected from zoos—were turned into clean white bones for study or mounting. However, his old skills as a master habitat sculptor were still intact, and he had been called in to work on a special shaman life-group for the Superstition exhibition. It was the painstaking preparation of this display group that Smithback wanted to include as one chapter in his book.

Following Von Oster’s gesture, Smithback stepped into the preparation area. He’d never seen this famous room before. “So glad you could come see my workshop,” Von Oster said. “Not many people down here [123] now, what with these dreadful killings. Very glad indeed!”

The workshop looked more like a bizarre industrial kitchen than anything else. Deep stainless-steel tanks lined one wall. On the ceiling near the tanks hung massive pulleys, chains, and grappling hooks for handling the larger carcasses. A drain was drilled into the center of the floor, a small broken bone caught in its grill. In a far corner of the workshop a stainless-steel gurney stood, bearing a large animal. If it hadn’t been for the large, hand-lettered sign taped to one leg of the gurney, Smithback wouldn’t have guessed that the creature had once been a Sargasso Sea Dugong; it was now almost fully decomposed. Around the corpse lay picks, pliers, tiny knives.

“Thanks for taking time to see me,” Smithback managed.

“Not at all!” Von Oster exploded. “I wish we could give tours, but you know this area is off limits to the tourists, the more is the pity. You should have been here for the rhinoceros. Gott, she was something!”

Walking briskly across the room, he showed Smithback the maceration tank containing the zebra carcass. Despite a hood drawing the vapors away, the smell was still strong. Von Oster lifted the lid and stood back like a proud cook.

“What you think of zat!”

Smithback looked at the soupy brown liquid filling the vat. Under the muddy surface lay the macerating zebra carcass, its flesh and soft tissues slowly liquefying.

“It’s a little ripe,” Smithback said weakly.