“Do tell,” Wicherly said.
“I’ve just skimmed the documents, so I don’t have the full story, but here it is in brief. On the morning of March 3, 1933, the guards arriving to open the tomb realized it had been broken into. A lot of objects were vandalized. The mummy was missing, later found in an adjacent room, badly mutilated. When they looked in the sarcophagus, they found a different body in it. A freshly murdered body, as it happened.”
“Amazing! Just like that fellow, what’s-his-name. DeMeo.”
“Sort of, except the resemblance stops there. The body belonged to Julia Cavendish, a wealthy New York socialite. She just happened to be the granddaughter of William C. Spragg.”
“Spragg?”
“He was the man who bought the tomb from the last Baron Rattray and had it shipped to the museum.”
“I see.”
“Cavendish was a patroness of the museum. She appears to have had a rather notorious reputation as—well, for want of a better term, a female rake.”
“How so?”
“She went to bars and picked up young working-class men—longshoremen, stevedores, and the like.”
“And did what with them?” Wicherly asked with a leer.
“Use your imagination, Adrian,” she said dryly. “Anyway, her body had been mutilated, but the papers don’t offer details.”
“Strong stuff for the thirties, I should say.”
“Yes. The family and the museum were desperate to cover it up—for different reasons, of course—and it seems they managed quite nicely.”
“I imagine the press was a bit more cooperative in those days. Not the muckraking chaps we have today.”
Nora wondered if Wicherly knew her husband was a reporter. “Anyway, the investigation into Cavendish’s murder was still ongoing when it happened again. This time the mutilated body belonged to Mongomery Bolt, apparently a collateral descendant of John Jacob Astor, a remittance man and a sort of black sheep in the family. The tomb was now being guarded at night, but the murderer sapped the guard before dumping Bolt’s body in the sarcophagus. A note was found on the body. There’s a copy of it in this file.”
She pulled out a yellowed sheet. On it was an Eye of Horus and several other hieroglyphs. Wicherly looked at it in bemusement.
“ ‘The Curse of Ammut Strikes All Who Enter,’ ” he intoned. “Whoever wrote this was ignorant. The chap barely knew his hieroglyphs. They aren’t even drawn properly. A crude fake.”
“Yes. They realized that right away.” She turned over some more papers. “Here’s the police report on that crime.”
“The plot thickens.” Wicherly winked, edged his seat closer.
“The police took notice of the link to John Jacob Astor. He’d helped finance the installation of the Tomb of Senef. The police began to wonder if someone wasn’t taking revenge on those responsible for bringing the tomb to the museum. Naturally, their suspicions fell on the Bey of Bolbassa.”
“The fellow who claimed the tomb was cursed.”
“Right. He’d gotten the newspapers all stirred up against the museum. Turns out he wasn’t even a real bey—whatever that is. There’s a report here on his background.”
Wicherly picked it up, sniffed. “Former carpet merchant, made a lot of money.”
“Again, the museum, along with the Astor family, was able to successfully quash any publicity—except it was impossible to stop the rumors circulating inside the museum itself. In time, the authorities established that the Bey of Bolbassa had returned to Egypt just before the killings, but they suspected he had hired operatives in New York. If he did, though, they were too clever to get caught. And when the third killing occurred—”
“Another?”
“This time it was an elderly lady who lived in the neighborhood. It took them a while to figure out the connection—turns out she was distantly descended from Cahors, the man who originally found the tomb. By now, the museum was boiling with rumors, and they were spreading to the general populace. Every crank spiritualist, medium, and tarot-card reader was converging on the museum, and New Yorkers were only too eager to believe the tomb was really cursed.”
“Credulous fools.”
“Perhaps. In any case, it just about emptied the museum. The police investigation wasn’t going anywhere, and so the museum decided to take preemptive action. Using the pretext of the construction of the 81st Street station pedestrian tunnel, they closed the tomb and sealed it up. The killings stopped, the rumors gradually died down, and the Tomb of Senef was mostly forgotten.”