The Cabinet of Curiosities

by Douglas Preston

  She nodded, took another drag. It made her dizzy. How could people smoke these things? She wished Smithback would hurry up.

  She smiled and dropped the butt, grinding it under her toe.

  Instantly the pack was out. “Another?”

  “No,” she said, “trying to cut back.”

  She could see him eyeing her spandex top, trying to be subtle. “You work in a bar?” he asked, then colored. Awkward question. Nora heard another sound, a few falling bricks.

  “Sort of,” she said, pulling the jacket tighter around her shoulders.

  He nodded. He was looking a little bolder now. “I think you’re very attractive,” he said, hastily, blurting it out.

  “Thanks,” she said. God, it was a thirty-second job. What was taking Smithback so long?

  “Are you, ah, free later?”

  Deliberately, she looked him up and down. “You want a date?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, sure.”

  There was another, louder sound: the rattling of a chain-link fence. Smithback climbing out? The guard turned toward it.

  “What kind of date?” Nora asked.

  He looked back at her, no longer trying to hide the roaming of his lascivious eyes. Nora felt naked beneath his gaze. There was another rattle. The guard turned again and this time saw Smithback. He was pretty hard to miss: clinging to the top of the fence, trying to unsnag his filthy raincoat.

  “Hey!” the guard yelled.

  “Forget him,” said Nora hastily. “He’s just some bum.”

  Smithback struggled. Now he was trying to slip out of his raincoat, but had only succeeded in becoming more tangled.

  “He’s not supposed to be in there!” the guard said.

  This, unfortunately, was a guy who took his job seriously.

  The man clapped his hand to his gun. “Hey you!” he yelled louder. “Hey!” He took a step toward the writer.

  Smithback struggled frantically with the raincoat.

  “Sometimes I do it for free,” Nora said.

  The guard swiveled back to her, eyes wide, the bum on the fence instantly forgotten. “You do?”

  “Sure. Why not? Cute guy like you…”

  He grinned like an idiot. Now she noticed his ears stuck out. What a weenie, so eager to cheat on his wife. Cheap, too.

  “Right now?” he asked.

  “Too cold. Tomorrow.” She heard a ripping sound, a thud, a muffled curse.

  “Tomorrow?” He looked devastated. “Why not now? At your place.”

  She took off the coat and gave it back to him. “Never at my place.”

  He took a step toward her. “There’s a hotel around the corner.” He reached over, trying to snake an arm around her waist.

  She skipped back lightly with another smile as her cell phone rang. Flooded with relief, she flipped it open.

  “Mission accomplished,” came Smithback’s voice. “You can get away from that creep.”

  “Sure, Mr. McNally, I’d love to,” she said warmly. “That sounds nice. See you there.” She made a smacking kiss into the phone and snapped it shut.

  She turned to the guard. “Sorry. Business.” She took another step back.

  “Wait. Come on. You said—” There was a note of desperation in the guard’s voice.

  She took a few more steps back and shut the chain-link gate in his face. “Tomorrow. I promise.”

  “No, wait!”

  She turned and began walking quickly down the sidewalk.

  “Hey, come on! Wait! Lady, please!” His desperate pleas echoed among the tenements.

  She ducked around the corner. Smithback was waiting, and he hugged her briefly. “Is that creep following?”

  “Just keep going.”

  They began running down the sidewalk, Nora wobbling on her high heels. They turned the far corner and crossed the street, then paused, panting and listening. The guard was not following.

  “Christ,” said Smithback, sinking against a wall. “I think I broke my arm falling off that goddamn fence.” He held up his arm. His raincoat and shirt had been torn and his bleeding elbow stuck out of the hole.

  Nora examined it. “You’re fine. Did you get the dress?”

  Smithback patted his grimy bag.

  “Great.”

  Smithback looked around. “We’re never going to find a cab down here,” he said with a groan.

  “A cab wouldn’t stop anyway. Remember? Give me your raincoat. I’m freezing.”

  Smithback wrapped it around her. He paused, grinning. “You look kind of… sexy.”

  “Stow it.” She began walking toward the subway.

  Smithback skipped after her. At the entrance to the subway, he stopped. “How about a date, lady?” he leered. “Hey lady, please!” He imitated the guard’s last, despairing entreaties.

  She looked at him. His hair was sticking out in all directions, his face had become even filthier, and he smelled of mold and dust. He couldn’t have looked more ridiculous.

  She had to smile. “It’s going to cost you big-time. I’m high-class.”

  He grinned. “Diamonds. Pearls. Greenbacks. Nights dancing in the desert under the coyote moon. Anything you want, baby.”

  She took his hand. “Now, that’s my kind of John.”

  SEVEN

  NORA LOCKED THE door to her office, placed the packet on a chair, and cleared her desk of papers and tottering stacks of publications. It was just past eight in the morning, and the Museum seemed to be still asleep. Nevertheless, she glanced at the window set into her office door, and then—with a guilty impulse she did not quite understand—walked over to it and pulled down the blind. Then she carefully covered the desktop with white acid-free paper, taped it to the corners, laid another sheet on top, and placed a series of sample bags, stoppered test tubes, tweezers, and picks along one edge. Unlocking a drawer of her desk, she laid out the articles she had taken from the site: coins, comb, hair, string, vertebra. Lastly, she laid the dress atop the paper. She handled it gently, almost gingerly, as if to make up for the abuse it had endured over the last twenty-four hours.

  Smithback had been beside himself with frustration the night before, when she had refused to slit open the dress immediately and see what, if anything, was written on the paper hidden inside. She could see him in her mind’s eye: still in his hobo outfit, drawn up to a height of indignation only a journalist with a need to know could feel. But she’d been unmoved. With the site destroyed, she was determined to squeeze every bit of information out of the dress that she could. And she was going to do it right.

  She took a step back from the desk. In the bright light of the office, she could examine the dress in great detail. It was long, quite simple, made of coarse green wool. It looked nineteenth-century, with a high collaret-style neckline; a trim bodice, falling in long pleats. The bodice and pleats were lined with white cotton, now yellowed.

  Nora slid her hand down the pleats and, right below the waistline, felt the crinkle of paper. Not yet, she told herself as she sat down at the desk. One step at a time.

  The dress was heavily stained. It was impossible to tell, without a chemical analysis, what the stains were—some looked like blood and body fluids, while others could be grease, coal dust, perhaps wax. The hemline was rubbed and torn, and there were some tears in the fabric itself, the larger ones carefully sewn up. She examined the stains and tears with her loup. The repairs had been done with several colored threads, none green. A poor girl’s effort, using whatever was at hand.

  There was no sign of insect or rodent damage; the dress had been securely walled up in its alcove. She switched lenses on the loup and looked more closely. She could see a significant amount of dirt, including black grains that looked like coal dust. She took a few of these and placed them in a small glassine envelope with the tweezers. She removed other particles of grit, dirt, hair, and threads, and placed them in additional bags. There were other specs, even smaller than the grit; she lugged over a portable stereozoom microscope, la
id it on the table, and brought it into focus.

  Immediately, dozens of lice leapt into view, dead and dry, clinging to the crudely woven fabric, intermingled with smaller mites and several giant fleas. She jerked her head back involuntarily. Then, smiling at herself, she took a closer, more studied look. The dress was a rich landscape of foreign biology, along with an array of substances that could occupy a forensic chemist for weeks. She wondered how useful such an analysis would be, considered the cost, and temporarily shelved the idea. She brought the forceps forward to take more samples.

  Suddenly, the silence in her office seemed all too absolute; there was a crawling sensation at the base of her neck. She swiveled, gasped; Special Agent Pendergast was standing behind her, hands behind his back.

  “Jesus!” she said, leaping out of the chair. “You scared the hell out of me!”

  Pendergast bowed slightly. “My apologies.”

  “I thought I locked that door.”

  “You did.”

  “Are you a magician, Agent Pendergast? Or did you simply pick my lock?”

  “A little of both, perhaps. But these old Museum locks are so crude, one can hardly call it ‘picking.’ I am well known here, which requires me to be discreet.”

  “Do you think you could call ahead next time?”

  He turned to the dress. “You didn’t have this yesterday afternoon.”

  “No. I didn’t.”

  He nodded. “Very resourceful of you, Dr. Kelly.”

  “I went back last night—”

  “No details of any questionable activities, please. However, my congratulations.”

  She could see he was pleased.

  He held out his hand. “Proceed.”

  Nora turned back to her work. After a while, Pendergast spoke. “There were many articles of clothing in the tunnel. Why this dress?”

  Without a word, Nora carefully turned up the pleats of the dress, exposing a crudely sewn patch in the cotton lining. Immediately, Pendergast moved closer.

  “There’s a piece of paper sewn inside,” she said. “I came upon it just before they shut down the site.”

  “May I borrow your loup?”

  Nora lifted it over her head and handed it to him. Bending over the dress, he examined it with a thorough professionalism that surprised and impressed Nora. At last he straightened up.

  “Very hasty work,” he said. “You’ll note that all the other stitching and mending was done carefully, almost lovingly. This dress was some girl’s prize garment. But this one stitch was made with thread pulled from the dress itself, and the holes are ragged—I would guess they were made with a splinter of wood. This was done by someone with little time, and with no access to even a needle.”

  Nora moved the microscope over the patch, using its camera to take a series of photographs at various magnifications. Then she fixed a macro lens and took another series. She worked efficiently, aware that Pendergast’s eyes were upon her.

  She put the microscope aside and picked up the tweezers. “Let’s open it up.”

  With great care, she teased the end of the thread out and began to undo the patch. A few minutes of painstaking work and it lay loose. She placed the thread in a sample tube and lifted the material.

  Underneath was a piece of paper, torn from the page of a book. It had been folded twice.

  Nora put the patch into yet another Ziploc bag. Then, using two pairs of rubber-tipped tweezers, she unfolded the paper. Inside was a message, scratched in crude brown letters. Parts of it were stained and faded, but it read unmistakably:

  i aM Mary Gree Ne agt 19 years No. 16 waTTer sTreeT

  Nora moved the paper to the stage of the stereozoom and looked at it under low power. After a moment she stepped back, and Pendergast eagerly took her place at the eyepieces. Minutes went by as he stared. Finally he stepped away.

  “Written with the same splinter, perhaps,” he said.

  Nora nodded. The letters had been formed with little scratches and scrapes.

  “May I perform a test?” Pendergast asked.

  “What kind?”

  Pendergast slipped out a small stoppered test tube. “It will involve removing a tiny sample of the ink on this note with a solvent.”

  “What is that stuff?”

  “Antihuman rabbit serum.”

  “Be my guest.” Strange that Pendergast carried forensic chemicals around in his pockets. What did the agent not have hidden inside that bottomless black suit of his?

  Pendergast unstoppered the test tube, revealing a tiny swab. Using the stereozoom, he applied it to a corner of a letter, then placed it back in its tube. He gave it a little shake and held it to the window. After a moment, the liquid turned blue. He turned to face her.

  “So?” she asked, but she had already read the results in his face.

  “The note, Dr. Kelly, was written in human blood. No doubt the very blood of the young woman herself.”

  EIGHT

  SILENCE DESCENDED IN the museum office. Nora found she had to sit down. For some time nothing was said; Nora could vaguely hear traffic sounds from below, the distant ringing of a phone, footsteps in the hall. The full dimension of the discovery began to sink in: the tunnel, the thirty-six dismembered bodies, the ghastly note from a century ago.

  “What do you think it means?” she asked.

  “There can be only one explanation. The girl must have known she would never leave that basement alive. She didn’t want to die an unknown. Hence she deliberately wrote down her name, age, and home address, and then concealed it. A self-chosen epitaph. The only one available to her.”

  Nora shuddered. “How horrible.”

  Pendergast moved slowly toward her bookshelf. She followed him with her eyes.

  “What are we dealing with?” she asked. “A serial killer?”

  Pendergast did not answer. The same troubled look that had come over him at the digsite had returned to his face. He continued to stand in front of the bookshelf.

  “May I ask you a question?”

  Pendergast nodded again.

  “Why are you involved in this? Hundred-and-thirty-year-old serial killings are not exactly within the purview of the FBI.”

  Pendergast plucked a small Anasazi bowl from the shelf and examined it. “Lovely Kayenta black-on-white.” He looked up. “How is your research on the Utah Anasazi survey going?”

  “Not well. The Museum won’t give me money for the carbon-14 dates I need. What does that have to—”

  “Good.”

  “Good?”

  “Dr. Kelly, are you familiar with the term, ‘cabinet of curiosities’?”

  Nora wondered at the man’s ability to pile on non sequiturs. “Wasn’t it a kind of natural history collection?”

  “Precisely. It was the precursor to the natural history museum. Many educated gentlemen of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries collected strange artifacts while roaming the globe—fossils, bones, shrunken heads, stuffed birds, that sort of thing. Originally, they simply displayed these artifacts in cabinets, for the amusement of their friends. Later—when it became clear people would pay money to visit them—some of these cabinets of curiosities grew into commercial enterprises. They still called them ‘cabinets of curiosities’ even though the collections filled many rooms.”

  “What does this have to do with the murders?”

  “In 1848, a wealthy young gentleman from New York, Alexander Marysas, went on a hunting and collecting expedition around the world, from the South Pacific to Tierra del Fuego. He died in Madagascar, but his collections—most extraordinary collections they were—came back in the hold of his ship. They were purchased by an entrepreneur, John Canaday Shottum, who opened J. C. Shottum’s Cabinet of Natural Productions and Curiosities in 1852.”

  “So?”

  “Shottum’s Cabinet was the building that once stood above the tunnel where the skeletons were found.”

  “How did you find all this out?”

  “Half an h
our with a good friend of mine who works in the New York Public Library. The tunnel you explored was, in fact, the coal tunnel that serviced the building’s original boiler. It was a three-story brick building in the Gothic Revival style popular in the 1850s. The first floor held the cabinet and something called a ‘Cyclorama,’ the second floor was Shottum’s office, and the third floor was rented out. The cabinet seems to have been quite successful, though the Five Points neighborhood around it was at the time one of Manhattan’s worst slums. The building burned in 1881. Shottum died in the fire. The police report suspected arson, but no perpetrator was ever found. It remained a vacant lot until the row of tenements was built in 1897.”

  “What was on the site before Shottum’s Cabinet?”

  “A small hog farm.”

  “So all those people must have been murdered while the building was Shottum’s Cabinet.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Do you think Shottum did it?”

  “Impossible to know as of yet. Those glass fragments I found in the tunnel were mostly broken test tubes and distillation apparatus. On them, I found traces of a variety of chemicals that I have yet to analyze. We need to learn a great deal more about J. C. Shottum and his cabinet of curiosities. I wonder if you would be so kind as to accompany me?”

  He obligingly opened the door to her office, and Nora automatically followed him into the hallway. He continued talking as they walked down the hall and took an elevator to the fifth floor. As the elevator doors hissed open, Nora suddenly came to her senses.

  “Wait a minute. Where are we going? I’ve got work to do.”

  “As I said, I need your help.”

  Nora felt a short jolt of irritation: Pendergast spoke so confidently, as if he already owned her time. “I’m sorry, but I’m an archaeologist, not a detective.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Is there a difference?”

  “What makes you think I’d be interested?”

  “You already are interested.”

  Nora fumed at the man’s presumption, although what he said was perfectly true. “And just how will I explain this to the Museum?”