Riptide (58 page)

“Can we move on here?” Collopy asked.

Menzies sat forward suddenly. “Frederick, this
is
moving on! Think back over your museum history. The Tomb of Senef was an Egyptian tomb on display in the museum from its
original opening until, I believe, the Depression, when it was closed.”

“And?”

“If memory serves, it was a tomb stolen and disassembled by the French during the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt and later seized
by the British. It ended up in some Scottish lord’s castle. It was purchased by one of the museum’s benefactors and reassembled
in the basement as one of the original exhibits. It must still be there.”

“So who is this Cahors?” Darling asked.

“Napoleon brought an army of naturalists and archaeologists with his army when he invaded Egypt. A Cahors led the archaeological
contingent. I imagine this fellow is a descendant.”

Collopy frowned. “What does this have to do with anything?”

“Don’t you see? This is precisely the exhibition we need!”

“A dusty old tomb?”

“Exactly! We make a big announcement of the gift, set an opening date with a gala party and all the trappings, and make a
media event out of it.” Menzies looked inquiringly at Rocco.

“Yes,” Rocco said. “Yes. That could work. Egypt is always popular with the general public.”

“Could work? It
will
work. The beauty of it is that the tomb’s already installed. We could do this in two months.”

“A lot depends on the condition of the tomb.”

“It would have been bricked up. Of course, it might be in poor condition, but nevertheless it’s in place and ready to go.
It might only need to be swept out. Our storage rooms are full of Egyptian odds and ends, mummies, canopic jars, ushabtis,
that sort of thing, that we could put in the tomb to round out the exhibition. And of course there’s always the chance its
original exhibits still remain in place, undisturbed. I doubt if there’s anyone still alive who really knows what condition
the tomb is in, or what it looks like. But the Count is offering plenty of money for its restoration.”

“I don’t understand,” Darling said. “How could an entire exhibition just sit behind a brick wall, moldering and forgotten,
for seventy years?”

“That’s the way it is.” Menzies smiled a little sadly. “This museum simply has too many artifacts and not enough money or
curators to tend them. That’s why I’ve lobbied for many years now that we create a position for a museum historian. Who knows
what other secrets sleep in the long-forgotten corners?”

A brief silence settled over the room, broken abruptly when Collopy brought his hand down on his desk. “Let’s do it.” He reached
for the phone. “Mrs. Surd? Tell the Count to release the money. We’re accepting his terms.”

O
N THE MORNING
appointed for the opening of the Tomb of Senef, Nora arrived in Menzies’ capacious office to find him sitting in his usual
wing chair, in conversation with a young man. They both rose as she came in.

“Nora,” he said. “This is Dr. Hugh Wicherly, the Egyptologist I mentioned to you. This is Dr. Nora Kelly.”

Wicherly turned to her with a smile, a thatch of untidy brown hair the only eccentricity of his otherwise perfectly dressed
and groomed person. In a glance Nora took in the understated Savile Row suit, the fine wingtips, the club tie. Her sweep came
to rest on an extraordinarily handsome face: dimpled cheeks, flashing blue eyes, and perfect white teeth. He was, she thought,
no more than thirty.

“Delighted to meet you, Dr. Kelly,” he said in an elegant, understated Oxbridge accent. He clasped her hand gently, blessing
her with a dazzling smile.

“A pleasure. And please call me Nora.”

“Of course. Nora. Forgive my formality—my stuffy upbringing has left me rather hamstrung this side of the pond. I just want
to say how smashing it is to be here, working on this project.”

Smashing.
Nora suppressed a smile. Hugh Wicherly was almost a caricature of the dashing young Brit, of a type she didn’t think even
existed outside P. G. Wodehouse novels.

“Hugh comes to us with some impressive credentials,” Menzies said. “D. Phil. from Oxford, directed the excavation of the tomb
KV 44 in the Valley of the Kings, University Professor of Egyptology at Cambridge, author of the monograph
Pharaohs of the XX Dynasty.
”

Nora looked at Wicherly with fresh respect. For an archaeologist of such stature, he was amazingly young. “Very impressive.”

Wicherly put on a self-deprecating face. “A lot of academic rubbish, really.”

“It’s hardly that.” Menzies glanced at his watch. “We’re meeting someone from the maintenance department at ten. As I understand
it, nobody knows, quite precisely, where the Tomb of Senef is anymore. The one certainty is that it was bricked up and has
been sealed ever since. We’re going to have to break our way in.”

“How intriguing,” said Wicherly. “I feel rather like Howard Carter.”

They descended in an old brass elevator, which creaked and groaned its way to the basement. They emerged in the maintenance
section and threaded a complex path through the machine shop and carpentry, at last arriving at the open door of a small office.
Inside, a small man sat at a desk, poring over a thick press of blueprints. He rose when Menzies rapped on the doorframe.

“I’d like to introduce you both to Mr. Seamus McCorkle,” said Menzies. “He probably knows more about the layout of the museum
than anyone alive.”

“Which still isn’t saying much,” said McCorkle. He was an elvish man in his early fifties with a fine Celtic face and a high,
whistling voice. He pronounced the final word ‘mitch.’

Introductions complete, Menzies turned back to McCorkle. “Have you found our tomb?”

“I believe so.” He nodded at the slab of old blueprints. “It’s not easy, finding things in this old pile.”

“Why ever not?” Wicherly asked.

McCorkle began rolling up the top blueprint. “The museum consists of thirty-four interconnected buildings, with a footprint
of more than six acres, over two million square feet of space and eighteen miles of corridors–and that’s not even counting
the sub-basement tunnels, which no one’s ever surveyed or diagrammed. I once tried to figure out how many rooms there were
in this joint, but gave up when I hit a thousand. The place has been under constant construction and renovation for every
single one of its hundred and forty years. That’s the nature of a museum—exhibits come and go, halls get built and closed,
collections get moved around. Rooms get joined together, others get split apart and renamed. Advances in technology mean new
labs, new storage areas, new ducts for computer cables and fiber optics. A lot of these changes are made on the fly, without
blueprints.”

“None of the museum’s original Gothic Revival building is even visible from the street,” added Menzies. “It’s now completely
encased by later construction.”

“But surely they couldn’t lose an entire Egyptian tomb,” said Wicherly.

McCorkle laughed. “That would be difficult, even for the museum. It’s finding the entrance that might be tricky. It was bricked
up in 1935 when they built the connecting tunnel between the 81st subway station and the museum.” He tucked the blueprints
under his arm and picked up an old leather bag that lay on his desk. “Shall we?”

“Lead the way,” said Menzies.

They set off along a puce green corridor, past maintenance rooms and storage areas, through a heavily-trafficked section of
the basement. As they went along, McCorkle gave a running account. “This is the metal shop. This is the old physical plant,
once home to the nineteenth-century boilers, now used to store the collection of whale skeletons. Jurassic dinosaur storage…
Cretaceous… Oligocene mammals… Pleistocene mammals….”

The storage areas gave way to laboratories, their shiny, stainless-steel doors in contrast to the dingy corridors, lit with
caged lightbulbs and lined with rumbling steam pipes.

They passed through so many locked doors, Nora lost count. Some were old and required keys, which McCorkle selected dexterously
from a large ring. Other doors, part of the museum’s new security system, could be opened by swiping a magnetic card. As they
moved deeper into the museum, the corridors became progressively empty and silent.

“I daresay this place is as vast as the British Museum,” said Wicherly.

McCorkle snorted in contempt. “Bigger.
Much
bigger.”

They came to a set of ancient riveted metal doors, which McCorkle opened with a large iron key. Darkness yawned beyond. He
hit a switch and illuminated a long, once-elegant corridor lined with dingy frescoes. Nora squinted. They were paintings of
a New Mexico landscape, with mountains, deserts, and a multistoried Indian ruin she recognized as Taos Pueblo.

“Fremont Ellis,” said Menzies. “This was once the Hall of the Southwest. Shut down since the forties.”

“These are extraordinary,” said Nora.

“Indeed. And very valuable.”

“They’re rather in need of curation,” said Wicherly.

“It’s a question of money,” Menzies said. “If a French count hadn’t stepped forward with the necessary grant, the Tomb of
Senef would probably sleep undisturbed for another seventy years.”

McCorkle opened another door, revealing a dim storage room full of shelves filled with beautifully painted pots. Old oaken
cabinets stood against the walls, fronted with rippled glass, revealing a profusion of dim artifacts.

“The Southwest collections,” McCorkle said.

“I had no idea,” said Nora, amazed. “These should be available for study.”

“As Hugh pointed out, they need to be curated first,” Menzies said. “Once again, a question of money.”

“It’s not only money,” McCorkle added, with a strange, pinched expression on his face.

There was a pause in which Nora exchanged glances with Wicherly. “I’m sorry?” she asked.

Menzies cleared his throat. “I think what Seamus means is that the, ah, first Museum Beast killings happened in the vicinity
of the Hall of the Southwest.”

In the fresh silence that followed, Nora made a mental note to have a look at these collections later—preferably, as a member
of a large group. Maybe she could write a grant to see them moved to up-to-date storage.

They continued on. Another door gave way to a smaller room, lined floor-to-ceiling with black metal drawers. Half hidden behind
the drawers were ancient posters and announcements from the twenties and thirties, with art deco lettering and images of Gibson
Girls. In an earlier era, it must have been an antechamber of sorts. The room smelled of paradichlorobenzene and something
bad—like old beef jerky, Nora decided.

At the far end, a great dim hall opened up. In the reflected light, she could see that its walls were covered with frescoes
of the Pyramids of Giza and the Sphinx as they had appeared when first built.

“Now we’re approaching the old Egyptian galleries,” McCorkle said.

They stepped into the vast hall. It had been turned into storage space: jumbles of sculptures covered in transparent plastic
sheets, which were in turn overlaid with dust, giving the appearance of ghosts. Lining the walls and obscuring the lower parts
of the frescoes were large metal shelves crowded with pottery vessels, gilded chairs and beds, headrests, canopic jars, and
hundreds of smaller figurines in alabaster, faience, and ceramic.

“Lovely,” Wicherly breathed.

McCorkle unrolled the blueprints and squinted at them in the dim light. “If my estimations are correct, the entrance to the
tomb is supposed to be in what is now the Annex, at the far end.”

Wicherly went to one shelf and lifted the plastic. “Good lord, this is one of the finest collection of ushabtis I’ve ever
seen.” He turned excitedly to Nora. “Why, there’s enough material here alone to fill up the tomb twice over.” He picked up
an ushabti and turned it over with reverence. “Old Kingdom, II Dynasty, reign of the pharaoh Hetepsekhemwy.”

“Dr. Wicherly, the rules about handling objects…” said McCorkle, a warning note in his voice.

“It’s quite all right,” said Menzies. “Dr. Wicherly is an Egyptologist. I’ll take responsibility.”

“Of course,” said McCorkle, a little put out. Nora had the feeling that McCorkle took a kind of proprietary interest in these
old collections. They were his, in a way, as he was one of the few people to ever see them.

Wicherly went from one shelf to the next, lifting the plastic again and again, his mouth practically watering. “Why, they
even have a Neolithic collection from the Upper Nile! Good lord, take a look at this ceremonial
thatof!
” He held up a footlong stone knife flaked from gray flint.

McCorkle cast an annoyed glance at Wicherly. The archaeologist laid the knife back in its place with the utmost care, then
reshrouded it in plastic.

They came to another iron-bound door, which McCorkle had some difficulty opening, trying several keys before finding the correct
one. The door groaned open at last, the hinges shedding clouds of rust.

They entered a small room filled with sarcophagi made of painted wood and cartonnage. Some were without lids and inside Nora
could make out the individual mummies, some wrapped, some unwrapped.

“The mummy room,” said McCorkle.

Wicherly rushed in ahead of the rest. “Good heavens, there must be a hundred in here!” He swept a plastic sheet aside, exposing
a large wooden sarcophagus. “Look at this!”

Nora went over and peered at the mummy. The linen bandages had been ripped from its face and chest, the mouth was open, the
black lips shrivelled and drawn back as if crying out in protest at the violation. Its chest was a gaping hole, the sternum
and ribs torn out.

Wicherly turned toward Nora, eyes bright. “Do you see?” he said in an almost reverential whisper, resting a light hand on
her shoulder. “This mummy was robbed. They tore off the linen to get at the precious amulets hidden in the wrappings. And
there—where that hole is—was where the mummy’s heart had been replaced by a jade and gold scarab beetle. The symbol of rebirth.
Gold was considered the flesh of the gods, because it never tarnished. They ripped the corpse open to take it.”