The Love Potion Murders in the Museum of Man

by Alfred Alcorn

  I did, however, manage to impersonate an attentive museum director deeply engrossed in the problems of acquiring, curating, and storing human skulls. It turns out there is something of a crisis in the collection. In his subdued but pithy way, Alger reported that, because of space limitations, you would have at present a better chance of winning a Nobel Prize than of getting your skull into the collection.

  The members of the visiting committee listened attentively. The committee is little more than a holdover from the days when the university was tightening its grip on the museum. I added a few new members on my own, an action that prompted a rebuke from the university’s Committee on Visiting Committees, which I ignored.

  Morgan Marsden, Professor of Divinity Emeritus, an expert on the afterlife and a longtime member of the committee, scratched the back of his own fine skull and said that surely, with the repatriation of skulls to various American Indian tribes, there must be a lot more room for new specimens.

  Alger, his head bones prominent, his complexion unnaturally sallow from spending a life virtually underground, reported that in fact the repatriation program had bogged down because of intertribal squabbles as to what skulls belonged to whom.

  Why not just move some of the less valuable skulls into a “deacquisition” program, asked Hermione Cabot, the doyenne of curators at the Frock, Wainscott’s small but well-endowed art museum.

  Alger shrugged. “It’s not that easy. They are human remains, and we’d have to bury them in a cemetery with all that entails. Crematoriums won’t touch them without a death certificate. I mean you can’t just load them into a Dumpster and have them taken to a landfill. Although, I suppose you could.”

  Alger also reported that the problem of bone mold, a pernicious form of which has afflicted our well-known Forensic Collection, is worse than initially estimated. He said they were running dehumidifiers around the clock, but it’s been a wet summer and part of the basement sits right on top of an old streambed.

  We went down to the basement for our usual tour of the collection, row upon row of grinning death. We examined a few serious cases of bone mold and looked at some new acquisitions for the Curiosities Cabinet.

  When we passed the room with the door of green baize behind which the Sociéte de Cochon Long used to hold its secret meetings, I tried the brass knob and found it locked. “What’s this used for?” I asked Alger.

  “Oh, we’re thinking about it for storage,” he said in a way that made me wonder.

  The meeting finally ended with resolutions to pursue funding for warehousing off-premises “marginal specimens” as well as those contested by Native American tribes. A subcommittee was formed to look into the bone mold problem and report back to both Alger and me.

  When the meeting concluded, I remained in the Twitchell Room, thinking I would pop in the cassette and simply watch it. I have to confess I was relieved again to be told the room had been scheduled for a meeting of the museum’s Subcommittee on Signage.

  Before returning to my office, I dropped in on Alger and said I would like to take a look at the room with the green baize door.

  He stalled me. He said something about not having the key. I mentioned that Mort would have one. Most reluctantly he produced one, and we made our way over there. I don’t know why. I found nothing there out of the ordinary. Except, perhaps, for the barest whiff of a scent vaguely familiar and disturbing to me.

  “So why not just store your overload in here?” I said to Alger.

  “It doesn’t have the proper climate controls,” he said.

  “But if they’re all surplus skulls, who cares what happens to them?”

  He nodded as though in agreement, but still with an odd reluctance.

  Returning to my office, I learned that Lieutenant Tracy was on his way over to see me. Doreen offered to fetch coffee, and I sat down pondering what news the Seaboard constabulary had come up with that could not be trusted to the telephone. All the while, I was conscious of Corny’s tape lying on my desk like an accusation.

  The coffee served, the door closed, the lieutenant got right down to business. The preliminary analysis of blood and tissue from Bert and Betti indicate that they ingested compounds similar if not identical to those found in Ossmann and Woodley.

  “Dr. Cutler called you?” I asked.

  “Right. He says the dosage may have been different, but he can’t really tell.”

  It does not reflect well on me, I know, but my real concern upon hearing this news involved the media. I did not want another circus. The lieutenant understood when I voiced my misgivings, agreeing that it was important not to have the information released until we had it all and until we had decided how best to handle it.

  He then asked me about my follow-up to the incident in the library involving the two employees and their accusations of mutual date rape. I told him I had drawn a blank so far. I recounted how, despite my initial resolve, I had, like any dutiful citizen of the institution, asked permission from Professor Athol to interview the disputants privately. He said he would have to refer the request to University Office of General Counsel, a veritable law firm, before taking any action.

  We discussed as well Celeste Tangent and the slow progress we were both having in obtaining her CV. It was then I realized something I already knew: Lieutenant Tracy had other cases, lots of them. Indeed, he told me then of a body they had just found behind a derelict gas station in Seaboard’s Old Town, a dicey sort of area.

  “Not Korky Kummerbund’s?”

  “I doubt it. A middle-aged man. Been there too long. We’ve called in Strom Weedly from the Herbarium.”

  “The forensic botanist.”

  “Right. He’s looking at ground cover, root invasion, fungal growths. Competent guy.”

  He got up to go, his coffee scarcely touched. An altogether decent man, I thought, considering how much of his life is spent dealing with the dark side of human existence.

  So here I am, with the cursor blinking at me, as though my words had a heartbeat. The tape and keys to the Twitchell Room are in the drawer. My responsibility to the museum and to the Chard family is to go downstairs, put the tape in the VCR, and watch the damn thing. But courage takes energy, and right now I am utterly drained. I scarcely have the wherewithal to go home. It seems that everywhere I turn death has come or death awaits and I suffer the awful realization that in life the only escape from death is death itself.

  17

  My quandary regarding the Corny Chard tape is worse than ever. I came in this afternoon with the express purpose of taking the tape to the Twitchell Room, putting it in the VCR, turning it on, and watching it. Which, indeed, is what I did. To a point.

  But not without stalling for a while, I have to admit. I joined the public for a stroll through the Diorama of Paleolithic Life in Neanderthal Hall, the space on the ground floor that undercuts the galleries in the atrium above. What a superb job young Edwards, our Director of Exhibits, and Thad Pilty have done. Many of the sensitive issues were sorted out finally. The individual Neanderthals look racially homogeneous; women are shown in positions of respect and authority; the children are all engaged in environmentally sound forms of play; all the hides and furs are clearly labeled as synthetic. (There is a courtship ritual of sorts that to me looks like some kind of lowlife making a pass at a woman in a bar, but all can’t be perfect.)

  How simple things must have been back then. Food, clothing, mating, and shelter. Although, I’m sure, back in some cave or other, on some ledge near where the rock face was being used as a canvas, someone had started a collection of discarded, nicely carved spearheads and bear claw jewelry, just for display. And someone had to curate it.

  But to the matter at hand. I cannot be too hard on myself. I finally left the public area, let myself into the Twitchell Room, found the right niche for the tape, inserted it, turned it on, and watched.

  As expected, the first few minutes of the tape were scarcely exceptional: shots of a dense jungle trail and sm
allish natives naked except for thongs around their waists and under their buttocks carrying what appeared to be blowguns and bows with great long arrows. The camera bobs a bit even in clear stretches, throwing out of sync the rhythmic walking movements of the all but naked haunches of the natives up ahead. It is clear that for much of the time they are climbing a fairly steep incline.

  They stop finally at a small clearing where, through a break in the dense canopy, the camera scans over a great, green, riverine forest. Corny’s voice comes over from the side in a breathlessness reminiscent of that Englishman who narrates nature programs. “Down below to the left you can see where they have clear-cut several hundred hectares, destroying habitat for both man and nature.”

  The picture jostles, goes blank. Then we see Corny standing on a log, slouch hat pulled over his balding, cropped pate, face blistered by the sun, stance defiant, every inch the fearless anthropologist of yore. “A lot of the tribespeople are noticeably hostile to outsiders now. I had difficulty recruiting what porters and guides I have with me here. As you can see ahead, even getting into Yomama territory is difficult. There are no permanent trails, and we will now have to cut our way with machetes through dense vegetation that reasserts itself very quickly.

  “Ahead of us, in a hidden upland valley, is the sacred village of the Yomamas, where no outsiders have been before, not even Ferdie, who’s been everywhere around these parts. Melvin Bricklesby made it as far as our base camp in 1957 but turned back when his porters wouldn’t go any farther. His account of Osunki, the anthropophagic ritual of the Yomamas, is, as he freely admits, based largely on hearsay. And now our escorts, from one of the small tribes along the tributary, refuse to go any farther. They’ve been getting more and more nervous. They’ve been making jokes, pointing at one another, rubbing their stomachs and laughing.

  “Ferdie yesterday made contact with a member of the tribe, and he tells me that the headman has agreed to let me witness and videotape Osunki in exchange, believe it or not, for the video camera taking this footage. An important Yomama I met down at the base camp thought it sheer magic that we could capture the living world in this box. Well, I’m not about to say no to a deal like that. So, at the risk of pomposity, let me say I am setting forth to record the conscience of my fellow humans, to refute once and for all the cannibalism deniers, that legion of the misguided who think the human species too good for the natural behavior of which it is capable.

  “Whew. We’ve been climbing along this trail now for several hours and we’ve only now come to the rough part. I’ve have never been in an area so remote in all my life.”

  For a while there is no voice-over, only the sound of birds in the canopy, Corny’s heavy breathing, and the slash of machetes as they cut their way through the dense understory of the jungle. The screen goes blank. When it comes back on it’s obviously some time later, though nothing seems to have changed. They are still moving slowly upward, the men ahead hacking away at the vegetation.

  The screen goes blank again. But when the picture returns, it shows them in a large, nearly paradisical setting, a green clearing spaced with conical grass huts with steep, heavily wooded hills all around.

  Corny, his voice with a distinct edge of excitement, his breathing strained, is saying, “We have arrived at Yama-beri, the sacred village of the Yomamas. As you can see, it is not exceptional from the other villages we have seen in this region. What’s different are these elaborately carved spit poles called issingi, yes, right Ferdie, that’s what the Yomamas call them.” The camera closes in on two forked poles embedded in the ground, the tips of which had been worked into knob shapes suggestively phallic. The camera shows several of these spaced around a large cleared space at one end of the village. There, lots of natives mill around, virtually naked from what I could see. “This is the issingi,” Corny continues, directing the camera at a gallows-like affair with two stout logs buried in the ground and a crossbar lashed to the top of it with rope woven from the inner bark of trees.

  A drumroll of sorts sounds from a hollow log beaten with sticks. The camera swings around to catch an imposing older man in loincloth and monkey skins, his face elaborately painted, as he approaches. Accompanying him are three nearly naked women, one quite heavy, and a fierce-looking younger man who shakes a gourd.

  Off camera, in a near whisper, Corny can be heard saying, “Here comes the chief and his three wives. The young man is his first son by his first wife.”

  The chief stops and, after an elaborate bow, makes a long speech as his son shakes the rattle all around Corny’s person. There is a sudden commotion on the screen. When the picture comes back on, Corny is being held and his limbs bound by several muscular-looking natives to the four corners of the gallows-like affair he mentioned earlier. He is looking into the camera, somewhat breathless, and saying, “Keep the tape rolling, Ferdie. I don’t know what they’re going to do, but let’s not miss any of it.”

  Corny shows, surprisingly, little obvious fear, more a kind of breathless exhilaration. He says, wincing as they strip off his clothes and bind him with what look like pieces of grass rope, “If being killed and eaten by a lion could be called the ultimate wildlife experience, I suppose that being killed and eaten by cannibals is an anthropologist’s ultimate contribution to research. It appears that I am no longer merely the observer, but have become the observed. Keep the camera steady, Ferdie.”

  The screen went blank for a moment. I fervently hoped it was the end of it. Then Corny appears again. One native is holding a slender hollow tube, perhaps five feet long, up to one of his nostrils, while another blows something through from the other end. Corny retches, but bends his head down for another dose of whatever it is they’re blowing up his nose. Finally, still retching but smiling, Corny is again talking into the camera, sounding even more like that hard-breathing Englishman.

  “That was tremendous, probably one of a class of hallucinogens used in these parts to induce trances. I should shortly be seeing visions. I am, of course, terrified. But I am also exalted. I only regret that I am not able to take notes, except verbally. My fervent hope is that whatever happens, that researchers will study this and do papers on it. I am scared but I am also excited. Both emotions, no doubt, will affect my objectivity as I am reduced in anthropological terms to ultimate subjectivity. Ferdie, pan to the right for a moment.”

  The camera pans to the right, and Corny can be heard in a voice-over. “There are the sacred cooking spits on which specific parts of the victim are slow-cooked, according to Bricklesby’s account. He relates that the body parts are consumed according to rank. The chief, seated over to the left, close on him, Ferdie, will get my heart. My genitals will go to his oldest son by his first wife. I’m quoting what I remember of Bricklesby’s report. I may get to witness the event depending on what they start on first. If Bricklesby has it right. My liver will go to the portly woman to the right of the chief. His first wife. The brain, strangely enough, is considered refuse and discarded. Perhaps it’s an example of primitive dietary laws. Oh, my God, here comes the chief and all his retinue. Ferdie, make sure you get this all down.”

  Ferdie pans back, showing a group of the natives coming over to kneel in front of Corny. They make placatory, almost devotional sounds. A figure in mask and loincloth shakes ashes over Corny’s head. “This is the purification ceremony. Those are the ashes, Bricklesby tells us, of the last celebrant as they call the victim. Notice that there is no animosity here. They consider it a great honor. I am about to become a part of the tribe. The Yomama word for ‘initiation’ is very close to the one used for this ceremony. Ferdie! Ferdie! It’s about to start …”

  A figure in an elaborate headdress dances to the pounding log drum and appears in front of Corny, who is spread naked like the universal human figure by Leonardo. “Ferdie, keep the camera on the shaman in the cockade of red macaw feathers. Oh, God, I think he’s doing the cleansing dance right now.”

  The camera keeps to the man in the brill
iant headdress and painted, near-naked torso dancing around and bending over an object on the ground. As Corny again comes into view a harsh, familiar sound is heard off camera. Corny gasps. “Oh, God. That’s a chain saw. Bricklesby said nothing about that. It’s not in the tradition. Oh, God. Or am I hallucinating?”

  Poor Corny is not hallucinating. The shaman figure comes into view holding what looks like an old chain saw. It’s sputtering and emitting great clouds of blue smoke as the figure approaches Corny.

  At which point I pressed the OFF button. I simply could not watch any more of it.

  Am I a coward? Perhaps. But as ambivalent as I may feel about Corny sometimes, he is still a member of the museum community. He is still one of us. And I dread, absolutely dread, having to watch him being sacrificed on the altar of anthropological research. More than that, I dread having to go to Jocelyn and explain to her what has happened to her husband.

  18

  No, I have not yet viewed the rest of the Corny Chard tape. I have dreamed about it. I obsess about it during my waking hours. The very drawer in which I have placed the tape seems haunted. Several times now I have taken it in hand, gone down to the Twitchell Room, and, at the last minute, pavid and pale, lost my nerve.

  Of course I have my excuses. I have been spending a good deal of time at home with Elsbeth. She has finally agreed to have an oxygen apparatus available to use when she has trouble breathing. I think she did it to relieve the anxiety Diantha and I experience when she starts gasping for breath like a fish out of water.