Pendergast [07] The Book of the Dead(166)
“That’s right,” said Smithback, smiling, his irrepressible good humor returning. “The old pile needs someone to shake it up from time to time, raise some fossil dust.”
Margo laughed quietly. “From what I’ve been reading, the last thing the museum needs right now is more controversy. Is it true four people died in the crush at that Egyptian opening?”
“Yes,” Nora said. “And another sixty were injured, a dozen of them severely.”
She exchanged glances with Smithback. The story that had come out in the two weeks since the opening was that a glitch in the system software caused the sound-and-light show to go out of control, in turn triggering a panic. The truth—that it could have been much, much worse—was so far known only to a select few in the museum and in law enforcement circles.
“Is it true the director was among the injured?” Margo asked.
Nora nodded. “Collopy suffered a seizure of some kind. He’s under psychiatric observation at New York Hospital, but he’s expected to make a full recovery.”
This was true—as far as it went—but of course it wasn’t the full story. Collopy, among several others, had fallen victim to Diogenes’s sound-and-light show, driven half psychotic by the laser pulsing and the low-frequency audio waves. The same might have happened to Nora had she not closed her eyes and covered her ears. As it was, she had suffered nightmares for a week. Pendergast and the others had stopped the show before it could run its full course and inflict permanent damage: and as a result, the prognosis was excellent for Collopy and the others—much better than for the unfortunate tech, Lipper.
Nora shifted in her chair. Someday she would tell Margo everything—but not today. The woman still had a lot of recovery ahead of her.
“What do you think it means for the museum?” Margo asked. “This tragedy at the opening, coming on the heels of the diamond theft?”
Nora shook her head. “At first everybody assumed it was the final straw, especially since the mayor’s wife was among the injured. But it turns out that just the opposite has happened. Thanks to all the controversy, the Tomb of Senef is the hottest show in town. Requests for ticket reservations have been pouring in at an unbelievable rate. I even saw somebody hawking I Survived the Curse T-shirts on Broadway this morning.”
“So they’re going to reopen the tomb?” Margo asked.
Smithback nodded. “Fast-tracking it, too. Most of the artifacts were spared. They hope to have it up and running within the month.”
“Our new Egyptologist is recasting the show,” Nora said. “She’s revising the original script, removing some of the cheesier special effects but keeping much of the sound-and-light show intact. She’s a great person, wonderful to work with, funny, unpretentious—we’re lucky to have her.”
“The news reports mentioned some FBI agent as instrumental in the rescue,” Margo said. “That wouldn’t happen to be Agent Pendergast, by any chance?”
“How did you guess?” Nora asked.
“Because Pendergast always manages to get into the thick of things.”
“You’re telling me,” Smithback said, smile fading. Nora noticed him unconsciously massaging the hand that had been burned by acid.
The nurse appeared in the doorway. “Margo, I’ll need to take you back to your room in another five minutes.”
“Okay.” She turned back to them. “I suppose he’s been haunting the museum ever since, asking questions, intimidating bureaucrats, and making a nuisance of himself.”
“Actually, no,” Nora said. “He disappeared right after the opening. Nobody has seen or heard from him since.”
“Really? How strange.”
“Yes, it is,” Nora said. “It’s very strange indeed.”
82
In late May, on the island of Capraia, two people—a man and a woman—sat on a terrace attached to a neat whitewashed house overlooking the Mediterranean. The terrace stood near the edge of a bluff. Below the bluff, surf crawled around pillars of black volcanic rock, wreathed in circling gulls. Beyond lay a blue immensity, stretching as far as the eye could see.
On the terrace, a table of weather-beaten wood was spread with simple food: a round of coarse bread, a plate of small salamis, a bottle of olive oil and a dish of olives, glasses of white wine. The scent of flowering lemons lay heavy in the air, mingling with the perfume of wild rosemary and sea salt. Along the hillside above the terrace, rows of grapevines were shooting out of coiling tendrils of green. The only sound was the faint cry of gulls and the breeze that rustled through a trellis of purple bougainvillea.