Relic

“Fired?” Margo asked.

“Burned clear with napalm,” Jörgensen said. “Unusual and expensive to do it that way. Apparently, the fire got out of hand, spread, burned uncontrollably for months. Then they built a big road in there, coming up the easy way from the south. They hauled in Japanese hydraulic mining equipment and literally washed away [229] huge sections of the mountain. No doubt they leeched the gold and platinum or whatever with cyanic compounds, then just let the poison run into the rivers. There’s nothing, I mean nothing, left. That’s why the Museum never sent a second expedition down to search for the remains of the first.” He cleared his throat.

“That’s terrible,” breathed Margo.

Jörgensen gazed up with his unsettling cerulean eyes. “Yes. It is terrible. Of course, you won’t read about it in the Superstition exhibition.”

Smithback held up one hand while slipping out his microcassette recorder with the other. “Excuse me, may I—?”

“No, you may not record this. This is not for attribution. Not for quotation. Not for anything. I’ve received a memo to that effect just this morning, as you probably know. This is for me: I haven’t been able to talk about this for years, and I’m going to do it now, just this once. So keep quiet and listen.”

There was a silence.

“Where was I?” Jörgensen resumed. “Oh, yes. So Whittlesey had no permit to ascend the tepui. And Maxwell was the consummate bureaucrat. He was determined to make Whittlesey play by the rules. Well, when you get out there in the jungle two hundred miles from any kind of government. ... What rules?” He cackled.

“I doubt if anybody knows exactly what did happen out there. I got the story from Montague, and he pieced it together from Maxwell’s telegrams. Not exactly an unbiased source.”

“Montague?” Smithback interrupted.

“In any case,” Jörgensen continued, ignoring Smithback, “it appears Maxwell stumbled upon some unbelievable botany. Around the base of the tepui, ninety-nine percent of the plant species were absolutely new to science. They found strange, primitive ferns and monocotyledons that looked like throwbacks to the Mesozoic Era. Even though Maxwell was a physical [230] anthropologist, he went crazy over the strange vegetation. They filled up crate after crate with odd specimens. That was when Maxwell found those seed pods.”

“How important were they?”

“They were from a living fossil. Not unlike the discovery of the coelacanth in the 1930s: a species from an entire phylum they thought had become extinct in the Carboniferous. An entire phylum.”

“Did these seed pods look like eggs?” asked Margo.

“I couldn’t say. But Montague got a look at them, and he told me they were hard as hell. They’d need to be buried deep in the highly acidic soil of a rain forest in order to germinate. I imagine they’re still in those crates.”

“Dr. Frock thought they were eggs.”

“Frock should stick to paleontology. He’s a brilliant man, but erratic. At any rate, Maxwell and Whittlesey had a falling out. Not unexpected. Maxwell couldn’t care less about botany, but he knew a rarity when he saw one. He wanted to get back to the Museum with his seed pods. He learned that Whittlesey intended to scale the tepui and look for the Kothoga, and it alarmed him. He was afraid the crates would be seized at dockside and he wouldn’t get his precious pods out. They split up. Whittlesey went on deeper into the jungle, up the tepui, and was never seen again.

“When Maxwell reached the coast with the rest of the expedition, he sent back a stream of telegrams to the Museum, lambasting Whittlesey and telling his side of the story. Then he and the rest were killed in that plane crash. Luckily, arrangements had been made to ship the crates separately, or maybe it wasn’t so lucky. Took the Museum a year to untangle the red tape, get the crates back to New York. Nobody seemed in a big hurry to do it.” He rolled his eyes in disgust.

“You mentioned somebody named Montague?” Margo asked quietly.

“Montague,” Jörgensen said, his eyes looking past [231] Margo. “He was a young Ph.D. candidate at the Museum. Anthropology. Whittlesey’s protégé. Needless to say, that didn’t exactly put him in the Museum’s good graces after Maxwell’s telegrams arrived. None of us who’d been friendly with Whittlesey were ever really trusted after that.”

“What happened to Montague?”

Jörgensen hesitated. “I don’t know,” he replied finally. “He just disappeared one day. Never came back.”

“And the crates?” Margo pressed.

“Montague had been terribly anxious to see those crates, especially Whittlesey’s. But, as I said, he was out of favor, and had been taken off the project. In point of fact, there was no project anymore. The whole expedition had been such a disaster that the top brass just wanted to forget anything had happened. When the crates finally arrived, they sat, unopened. Most of the documentation and provenance had burned up in the crash. Supposedly, there was a journal of Whittlesey’s, but I never saw it. In any case, Montague complained and pleaded, and in the end they gave him the job of doing the initial curating. And then he just up and left.”

“What do you mean, left?” Smithback asked.

Jörgensen looked at him, as if deciding whether or not to answer the question. “He simply walked out of the Museum and never came back. I understand his apartment and all his clothes were abandoned. His family instituted a search and found nothing. But he was a rather strange character. Most people assumed he’d gone off to Nepal or Thailand to find himself.”

“But there were rumors,” Smithback said. It was a statement, not a question.

Jörgensen laughed. “Of course there were rumors! Aren’t there always? Rumors that he embezzled money, rumors that he ran off with a gangster’s wife, rumors that he’d been murdered and dumped in the East River. But he was such a nonentity in the Museum that most people forgot about him in a few weeks.”

[232] “Rumors that the Museum Beast got him?” Smithback asked.

Jörgensen’s smile faded. “Not exactly. But it caused all the rumors of the curse to resurface. Now everyone, they said, who had come in contact with the crates had died. Some of the guards and cafeteria employees—you know those types—said Whittlesey had robbed a temple, that there was something in the crate, a relic with a terrible curse on it. They said the curse followed the relic all the way back to the Museum.”

“Didn’t you want to study the plants that Maxwell sent back?” Smithback asked. “I mean, you’re a botanist, aren’t you?”

“Young man, you know nothing of science. There is no such thing as a botanist per se. I have no interest in the paleobotany of angiosperms. That whole thing was way out of my field. My specialty is the coevolution of plants and viruses. Or was,” he said with a certain irony.

“But Whittlesey wanted you to take a look at the plants he sent back as packing material,” Smithback continued.

“I have no idea why,” Jörgensen said. “This is the first I’ve heard of it. I never saw this letter before.” With a certain reluctance, he handed it back to Margo. “I’d say it’s a fake, except for the handwriting and the motif.”

There was a silence. “You haven’t said what you thought about Montague’s disappearance,” Margo said at last.

Jörgensen rubbed the bridge of his nose and looked at the floor. “It frightened me.”

“Why?”

There was a long silence. “I’m not sure,” he finally said. “Montague once had a financial emergency and had to borrow money from me. He was very conscientious and went through great difficulties paying it back. It didn’t seem in character for him to just disappear like that. The last time I saw him, he was about to do an [233] inventory of the crates. He was very excited about it.” He looked up at Margo. “I’m not a superstitious man. I’m a scientist. Like I said, I don’t believe in curses and that sort of thing ...” his voice trailed off.