Pendergast [07] The Book of the Dead(14)

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

“Adrian comes to us with some impressive credentials,” Menzies said. “D.Phil. from Oxford, directed the excavation of the tomb KV 42 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. He was amazingly young for an archaeologist of such stature. “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 inaccessible 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 as Menzies rapped on the door frame.

“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.

After completing the introductions, Menzies turned back to McCorkle. “Have you found our tomb?”

“I believe so.” McCorkle 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, gave up when I hit a thousand. It’s been under constant construction and renovation for every single one of its hundred and forty years. That’s the nature of a museum—collections get moved around, rooms get joined together, others get split apart and renamed. And a lot of these changes are made on the fly, without blueprints.”

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

McCorkle laughed. “That would be difficult, even for this museum. It’s finding the entrance that might be tricky. It was bricked up in 1935 when they built the connecting tunnel from the 81st Street subway station.” 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 puke-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 ancient boilers, now used to store the collection of whale skeletons. Jurassic dinosaur storage… Cretaceous… Oligocene mammals… Pleistocene mammals… dugongs and manatees…”

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 from a large ring. Other doors, part of the museum’s new security system, he opened by swiping a magnetic card. As they moved deeper into the fabric of the building, 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 an ancient set of 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.