Reliquary (9 page)

D’Agosta found himself growing irritated at her brusque, disrespectful tone. “Look, Hayward, we’re not talking about D day here. We’re talking about a quiet peek. I’m going out on a limb as it is. If it looks like something, then we can make it official.”

Hayward said nothing.

“And Hayward? If I hear any talk about this little party of ours, I’ll know where it came from.”

Hayward stood up, smoothed her dark blue trousers, straightened her service belt. “Understood.”

“I knew it would be.” D’Agosta stood up, exhaling a jet of smoke in the direction of the
NO SMOKING
sign. He watched as Hayward glanced at the cigar with either disdain or disapproval, he wasn’t sure which. “Care for one?” he asked sarcastically, sliding another out of his breast pocket.

For the first time, Hayward’s lips twitched in what might almost have been a smile. “Thanks, but no thanks. Not after what happened to my uncle.” “What was that?”

“Mouth cancer. They had to cut his lips off.” D’Agosta watched as Hayward turned on her heel and walked quickly out of his office. He noticed she hadn’t bothered to say good-bye. He also noticed that, suddenly, the cigar didn’t taste as good anymore.

= 8 =

He sat in the listening darkness, unmoving.

Although the chamber was devoid of light, his eyes flicked from surface to surface, lingering with a loving glance on each object they encountered. It was still a novelty; he could sit motionless for hours, enjoying the marvelous acuteness of his own senses.

Now he closed his eyes and allowed himself to listen to the distant sounds of the city. Slowly, from the background murmur, he sorted out the various strands of conversation, filtering the nearest and loudest from those more distant, many rooms or even floors away. Then those, too, faded into the haze of his concentration, and he could hear the faint scamperings and squeals of the mice as they carried out their own secret cycles of life within the walls. At times he thought he could hear the sound of the earth itself, rolling and churning, swathed in its atmosphere.

Later--he was not sure how much later--the hunger started again. Not a hunger exactly, but the feeling of something
missing:
a deep craving, unlocalized, subtle for the time being. He never allowed the craving time to grow.

Standing quickly, he stepped across the laboratory, surefooted in the blackness. Turning on one of the gas spigots along the far wall, he lit the attached nozzle with a sparker, then positioned a retort of distilled water over the burner. As the water heated, he reached into a secret pocket sewn into the lining of his coat and withdrew a slender metal capsule. Unscrewing its end, he poured a trace of powder onto the surface of the water. Had there been light, the powder would have shone the color of light jade. As the temperature rose, a thin cloud began to spread downward from the surface until the entire retort became a miniature storm of roiling liquid.

He turned off the heat, then emptied the distillate into a Pyrex beaker. This was the point at which the decoction should be placed between the hands, the mind emptied, the ritual movements performed, the caressing vapor allowed to rise and fill the nostrils. But he could never wait; once again, he felt his palate burn as he swallowed the liquid greedily. He laughed to himself, amused at his own inability to follow the precepts he had set so sternly for others.

Even before he was seated again, the hollow feeling was gone, and the long slow rush had started: a flush that began in his extremities, then spread inward until it seemed that the very core of his being was on fire. An indescribable feeling of power and well-being surged through him. His senses, already hyperacute, seemed to expand until he could see infinitesimal dust motes hanging in the pitch black; until he could hear all of Manhattan in conversation with itself, from cocktail chat in the Rainbow Room seventy stories above Rockefeller Center, to the hungry wailing of his own children, far below-ground in secret forgotten spaces.

They were growing hungrier. Soon, not even the Ceremony would control them all.

But by then it would no longer be necessary.

The darkness seemed almost painfully bright, and he closed his eyes, listening to the vigorous rush of blood through the natural gates and alleys of his inner ears. He would keep his eyelids closed until the peak of sensation--and the odd, silvery sheen that temporarily covered his eyes--had gone.
Whoever named it glaze,
he thought with amusement,
named it well.

Soon--all too soon--the fierce bloom faded. But the power remained, a constant reminder in his joints and sinews of what he had become. If only his former colleagues could see him now. Then they’d understand.

Almost regretfully, he stood again, unwilling to leave the site of so much pleasure. But there was much that needed doing.

It would be a busy night.

= 9 =

Margo approached the door, noting with distaste that it was as dirty as ever. Even in a museum known for its high dust tolerance, the door to the Physical Anthropology lab--or Skeleton Room, as the staff universally referred to it--was almost unbelievably grimy.
This can’t have been washed since the turn of the century,
she thought. A patina of hand oils coated the knob and the surrounding area like a shiny varnish. She considered getting a tissue out of her carryall, then dismissed the thought, grabbed the knob tightly, and turned.

As usual, the room was dimly lit, and she had to squint to make out the tiers of metal drawers that rose to the ceiling like the stacks of some vast library. Each of the twelve thousand drawers contained, either whole or in part, the remains of a human skeleton. Although most belonged to native peoples of Africa and the Americas, Margo was interested in the subset of skeletons that had been collected for medical, rather than anthropological, purposes. Dr. Frock had suggested that, as a first step, they examine the remains of people with acute bone disorders. Perhaps, he’d hypothesized, the victims of such ailments as acromegaly or Proteus syndrome could help shed some light on the bizarre skeleton that waited for them under the blue plastic sheet in Forensic Anthropology.

As she threaded her way between the giant stacks, Margo sighed. She knew the impending encounter would be unpleasant. Sy Hagedorn, administrator of the Physical Anthropology lab, was almost as old and desiccated as the skeletons he watched over. Along with Curley manning the staff entrance, Emmaline Spragg of Invertebrate Biology, and a few others, Sy Hagedorn was the last remnant of the Museum old guard. Despite the Museum’s computerized collection database, and despite the high-tech laboratory that lay just beyond the Skeleton Room, he steadfastly refused to bring his cataloguing methods into the twentieth century. When her erstwhile colleague Greg Kawakita had made his office in the lab, he’d had to endure Hagedorn’s withering scorn every time he opened up his laptop. Behind Hagedorn’s back, Kawakita had nicknamed the administrator “Stumpy.” Only Margo and a few of Frock’s other graduate students had known the name referred not to Hagedorn’s diminutive size, but to
Stumpiniceps troglodytes,
a particularly mundane kind of bottom-feeder that populated the oceans of the Carboniferous period.

At the thought of Kawakita, Margo frowned guiltily. He’d left a message on her answering machine maybe six months before, apologizing for dropping out of touch, saying he needed to speak to her, that he’d try again the same time the following evening. When her phone had rung again at the appointed time twenty-four hours later, Margo had reached for it automatically, then frozen, her hand inches from the handset. Nobody left a message when the machine picked up, and she had drawn her hand back slowly, wondering exactly what instinct had prevented her from answering Kawakita’s call. But even as she’d done so, she’d known the answer. Kawakita had been a part of it all ... along with Pendergast, Smithback, Lieutenant D’Agosta, even Dr. Frock. His extrapolation program had been the key that helped them understand Mbwun: the creature that had terrorized the Museum and that still roamed her uneasy dreams. Selfish as it was, the last thing she’d wanted was to talk to someone who would unnecessarily remind her of those awful days. Silly, in retrospect, now that she was chin-deep in an investigation that--

The sudden fussy clearing of a throat brought Margo back to the present. She looked up to see a short man standing before her, wearing a worn tweed suit, his leathery face lined with innumerable wrinkles.

“I thought I heard somebody wandering around my skeletons,” Hagedorn said, frowning, tiny arms crossed in front of his chest. “Well?”

Despite herself, Margo felt annoyance begin to take the place of her daydreams. His skeletons, indeed. Stifling her irritation, she pulled a sheet of paper from her carryall. “Dr. Frock wants these specimens sent up to the Forensic Anthropology lab,” she replied, handing the sheet to Hagedorn.

He scanned it, the frown deepening. “
Three
skeletons?” he said. “That’s somewhat irregular.”

Up yours, Stumpy.
“It’s important we get these right away,” she said. “If there’s a problem, I’m sure Dr. Merriam will give whatever authorization you need.”

Mentioning the Director’s name had the desired effect. “Oh, very well. But it’s still irregular. Come with me.”

He led her back toward an ancient wooden desk, heavily scarred and pitted from years of neglect. Behind the desk--in rows of tiny drawers--was Hagedorn’s filing system. He checked the first number on Frock’s list, then ran a thin yellow finger down drawers. Stopping at last, he pulled out a drawer, rifled through the cards within, and plucked one out, harrumphing in displeasure. “1930-262,” he read. “Just my luck. On the very top tier. I’m not as young as I used to be, you know. Heights bother me.”

Suddenly he stopped. “This is a medical skeleton,” he said, pointing to a red dot in the upper right-hand corner of the card.

“All of the requests are,” Margo replied. Though it was clear Hagedorn wanted an explanation, she fell into a stubborn silence. At last the administrator cleared his throat again, his eyebrows contracting at the irregularity of the request. “If you insist,” he said, sliding the card across the desk toward her. “Sign this, add your extension and department, and don’t forget to place Frock’s name in the Supervisor column.”

Margo looked at the grimy paper, its edges soft with wear and age.
It’s a library card,
she thought.
How quaint.
The skeleton’s name was printed neatly at the top: Homer Maclean. That was one of Frock’s requests, all right: a victim of neurofibromatosis, if she remembered correctly.

She bent forward to scrawl her name in the first blank row, then stopped abruptly. There, three or four names up the list of previous researchers, was the jagged scrawl she remembered so well: G. S. Kawakita, Anthropology. He’d taken this very skeleton out for research five years earlier. Not surprising, she supposed: Greg had always been fascinated by the unusual, the abnormal, the exception to the rule. Perhaps that’s why he’d been attracted to Dr. Frock and his theory of fractal evolution.

She remembered how Greg had been notorious for using this very storage room for fly-casting practice, snapping nymphs down the narrow rows during practically every coffee break. When Hagedorn was not around, of course. She suppressed a grin.

That does it, she thought. I’ll look up Greg’s number in the phone book this evening. Better late than never.

There was a high-pitched, rattling wheeze, and she looked up from the card into the small impatient eyes of Hagedorn. “It’s just your
name
I want,” he said waspishly. “Not a line of lyric poetry. So stop thinking so hard and let’s get on with it, shall we?”

= 10 =

The broad ornate front of the Polyhymnia Club squatted on West 45th Street, its marble and sandstone bulk heaving outward like the stern of some Spanish galleon. Above its awning, a gilt statue of the club’s namesake, the muse of rhetoric, stood on one foot as if poised to take flight. Beneath it, the club’s revolving door did a brisk Saturday evening business; although patronage was limited to members of the New York press, that still let in, as Horace Greeley once complained, “half the unemployed young dogs south of Fourteenth Street.”

Deep within its oak fastness, Bill Smithback stepped up to the bar and ordered a Caol Ila without ice. Though he was for the most part uninterested in the club’s pedigree, he was very interested in its unique collection of specially imported scotch whisky. The single malt filled his mouth with the sensation of peat smoke and Loch nam Ban water. He savored it for a long moment, then glanced around, ready to drink in the congratulating nods and admiring glances of his fellow pressmen.

Getting the Wisher assignment had been one of the biggest breaks of his life. Already, it had netted him three front-page stories in less than a week. He’d even been able to make the ramblings and vague threats of the homeless leader, Mephisto, seem incisive and pertinent. Just that afternoon, as Smithback was leaving the office, Murray had thumped him heartily on the back. Murray, the editor who never had a word of praise for anyone.

His survey of the clientele unsuccessful, Smithback turned toward the bar and took another sip. It was extraordinary, he thought, the power of a journalist. A whole city was now up in arms because of him. Ginny, the pool secretary, was at last growing overwhelmed by the volume of calls about the reward, and they’d had to bring in a dedicated switchboard operator. Even the mayor was taking heat. Mrs. Wisher had to be pleased with what he’d accomplished. It was inspired.

A vague thought that somehow Mrs. Wisher had deliberately manipulated him flitted across his field of consciousness and was quickly pushed aside. He took another sip of scotch, closing his eyes as it trickled down his gullet like a dream of a finer world.

A hand gripped his shoulder, and he turned eagerly. It was Bryce Harriman, the
Times
crime reporter who was also covering the Wisher case.