Pendergast [07] The Book of the Dead(10)

She stared at the glittering array, once again trying to make sense of it. This was the core of her major research project at the museum: tracing the diffusion of this rare micaceous pottery from its source in southern Utah as it was traded and retraded across the Southwest and beyond. The pottery had been developed by a religious kachina cult that had come up from Aztec Mexico, and Nora believed that—by tracing the spread of the pottery across the Southwest—she could thereby trace the spread of the kachina cult.

But there were so many sherds, and so many C-14 dates, that making all the variables work together was a thorny problem, and she had not even begun to solve it. She stared hard: the answer was there. She just had to find it.

She sighed and took a sip of coffee, glad she had her basement lab as a refuge from the storm raging outside the museum above. Yesterday it had been the anthrax scare, but today was worse—thanks in large part to her husband, Bill, who had a singular knack for stirring up trouble. He had broken the story in the Times this morning that the powder was, in fact, the museum’s stolen diamond collection, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, pulverized to dust by the thief. The news had caused an uproar worse than anything Nora could remember. The mayor, cornered by a bevy of television cameras outside his office, had already blasted the museum and called for the immediate removal of its director.

She forced her mind back to the problem of the potsherds. All the lines of diffusion led back to one place: the source of the rare clay at the base of the Kaiparowits plateau of Utah, where it had been mined and fired by the inhabitants of a large cliff dwelling hidden in the canyons. From there, it had been traded to places as far away as northern Mexico and western Texas. But how? And when? And by whom?

She got up and went to a cabinet, removing the last ziplock bag of potsherds. The lab was as quiet as a tomb, the only sound the faint hiss of the forced-air ducts. Beyond the laboratory itself lay large storage areas: ancient oak cabinets with rippled glass windows, filled with pots, arrowheads, axes, and other artifacts. A faint whiff of paradichlorobenzene wafted in from the Indian mummy storage room next door. She began laying the sherds out on the map, filling in its last blank corner, double-checking the accession number on each sherd as she placed it.

Suddenly she paused. She had heard the creaking-open of the laboratory door and the sound of a soft footfall on the dusty floor. Hadn’t she locked it? It was a silly habit, locking the door: but the museum’s vast and silent basement, with its dim corridors and its dark storage rooms filled with strange and dreadful artifacts, had always given her the creeps. And she could not forget what had happened to her friend Margo Green just a few weeks earlier in a darkened exhibition hall, two floors above where she stood now.

“Is someone there?” she called out.

A figure materialized from the dimness, first the outlines of a face, then a closely trimmed beard with silvery-white hair—and Nora relaxed. It was only Hugo Menzies, chairman of the Anthropology Department and her immediate boss. He was still a little pale from his recent bout with gallstones, his cheerful eyes rimmed in red.

“Hello, Nora,” said the curator, giving her a kindly smile. “May I?”

“Of course.”

Menzies perched himself on a stool. “It’s so lovely and quiet down here. Are you alone?”

“Yes. How are things up top?”

“The crowd outside is still growing.”

“I saw them when I came in.”

“It’s getting ugly. They’re jeering and hectoring the arriving staff and blocking traffic on Museum Drive. And I fear this is just the beginning. It’s one thing when the mayor and governor make pronouncements, but it appears the people of New York have also been aroused. God save us from the fury of the vulgus mobile.”

Nora shook her head. “I’m sorry that Bill was the cause—”

Menzies laid a gentle hand on her shoulder. “Bill was only the messenger. He did the museum a favor in exposing this ill-advised cover-up scheme before it could take hold. The truth would have come out eventually.”

“I can’t understand why someone would go to the trouble to steal the gems and then destroy them.”

Menzies shrugged. “Who knows what goes on in the mind of a deranged individual? It evinces, at the very least, an implacable hatred of the museum.”

“What had the museum ever done to him?”

“Only one person can answer that question. But I’m not here to speculate on the criminal’s mind. I’m here for a specific reason, and it has to do with what’s going on upstairs.”

“I don’t understand.”