Trace elements, p.17
Trace Elements, page 17
Of her choice virtues only gods should speak,
Or English poets who grew up on Greek . . .
Well, perhaps a German who grew up on Greek, he chuckled and read on.
How well her wishes went! She stroked my chin,
She taught me Turn, and Counter-turn, and Stand;
Von Sackler felt himself grow hard with memory of her.
She taught me Touch, that undulant white skin;
I nibbled meekly from her proffered hand;
She was the sickle; I, poor I, the rake,
Coming behind her for her pretty sake
(But what prodigious mowing we did make). . . .
(She moved in circles, and those circles moved).
Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay:
I'm martyr to a motion not my own; . . .
These old bones live to learn her wanton ways:
(I measure time by how a body sways).
He would see her once more he decided.
Chapter 26
Von Sackler walked through the gate into the small and neatly kept yard. He went up the front steps and was about to knock on the door when it swung open.
“You’re here!” Jean Scroop stood before him, her small intense eyes totally opaque in their darkness. Von Sackler was unsettled. Had he been expected? It certainly seemed that way. This was not how it was supposed to go. He was supposed to surprise the Scroops with his knowledge of their activities. And yet here Jean Scroop stood before him ready, alert, and possibly cognizant of his intentions. “I have a lot of time these days,” she said matter-of-factly. “I watch out the window a good deal.” There was the slightest suggestion of a defensive tone in her voice. She had been too quick, of course, von Sackler thought, and she realizes that now. She tried to make a little joke. Something about old age and no need for sleep. But it didn’t work. He knew it and she knew that he knew it. Gone was the chatty gay officiousness that had crackled across the cables of communication in their previous roles as Peabody registrar and Altertumskunde curator.
“You have something you wish to discuss with me, Herr von Sackler?”
“Yes, may I come in?”
She hesitated and for a second seemed thoroughly thrown by the request. “Yes, yes, of course.”
He stepped a few feet into the hallway. Jean Scroop seemed rooted to the floor. Was she going to ask him in further, to even sit down perhaps? He wondered if he should ask if her son Tobias should be present. He decided against it and looked toward a doorway that led into a parlor. She picked up the hint.
“Would you like to come in and sit down?”
“That would be very nice.”
It was a small room, and von Sackler thought as he sank down into an exceptionally soft overstuffed chair that there was not a single gracious thing about it. A wide doorway led to another room beyond which seemed to be a library of sorts. From his limited perspective of this second room he could see a cluster of photographs on a facing wall that seemed to be old and rather faded.
“So what have you come to see me about?”
Von Sackler pried himself out of the chair. He could not deliver blackmail while sinking into this seemingly bottomless pit of down.
He had thought it out on his walk over. He had decided to be very direct and affirmative in tone. There was no need to be threatening. The mere fact that he had figured them and their business out was sufficiently threatening. He walked by the wide door of the second room. He paused and looked at the wall with the photographs. They were all of the same young man, more elegant than Tobias, but slightly like him. Probably his father. He took two steps toward the couch on which Jean Scroop was sitting rather primly. He bent over so that his head was only a few inches above hers.
“Mrs. Scroop, I know what you and Tobias have been doing.” He spoke very softly. She did not blink. “There is no cause for alarm.” “Do I look alarmed?” The black eyes in the withered sockets
betrayed not a glimmer of emotion. Von Sackler was suddenly in the grip of panic. Where the hell was Tobias? He wheeled around. There was nobody there. The little dark creature clearly had the upper hand despite the fact that he had just informed her that he knew she was dealing in black market antiquities. He kept his back to her for a second to regain his composure.
“No,” he said, turning around, “you do not look alarmed. I commend you. I also commend you on your flawless work.”
“That is Tobias’s artistry, not mine.”
“Yes, and it is on that account I am now here.”
“Oh!” The hand touched a ripple of the marcelled hair, a calculated gesture perhaps to camouflage her curiosity or surprise. But just as he thought that, Jean Scroop announced in a flat voice, “I’m not surprised.”
The woman was uncanny! The prematurely opened door seemed now like a rather gratuitous symbolic flourish of her startling premonitory abilities which left her consistently in the one-up position.
“Just idle curiosity, Mrs. Scroop, but why are you not surprised?” “Well, I could say that you’re very hungry, and I would not be wrong, would I?” A taut smile pulled at her face. “We’re alike in a sense.”
“In what sense is that?” Not that he really wanted to know. It could only be morbid curiosity that would allow him to pursue the question. Only the most superficial sameness could be construed. But perhaps he was trying to humor her. There was something dreadful that was contained within this woman. It was not as if she were simply a disagreeable person. It was something else lodged deep within her being. It was as if some dark possibly obscene riddle hovered within her, at her very center. His rhetorical responses, which now sounded so calculatingly pleasant, were in fact a desperate attempt to throw up a barrier between himself and that dreadful thing inside her.
The smile on her face pulled harder until it seemed to speak by itself, rather like the Cheshire cat. “Well, I am not hungry in exactly the same way you are.”
“And what way is that?”
“Money, power,” she replied dully. “But we have both been—how should I put it? Passed over.”
“You know then about the directorship.”
“Yes. Too bad. Guth knows nothing.” He felt something in him relax. A sense of rightness, wholeness stole over him. Here was someone who recognized his worth, who understood the wrongness of it all, the injustice.
“How, Madame, may I ask, were you passed over?”
“That is not for you to know.” The words dashed at him like pellets of cold water. He had been prepared to stand there and offer her small morsels of sympathy. She clearly was superior in terms of manipulation. She was a master.
Well, he could be equally hard. “So you will not tell me what prompted you to begin trafficking in forgery?”
“No, I will not. And technically you are wrong. We are not trafficking per se in forgeries. The real piece is sold. The fake is left in its place.” A small noise burbled up from her narrow chest, followed by another and another. Like a stream of silvery bubbles, the laughter came until the thin body was convulsed in a froth of giggles. It was a pretty sound, too young for the dark old body from which it emanated. She wiped tears of laughter from her eyes and regained her composure. “Monstrously clever, isn’t it? But the funniest part . . .” And here she began to laugh again. “The funniest part is that a real portion of Harvard’s deep storage collection is now completely fake—phoney at the core, just like Harvard.”
“And what if you get caught?”
“Oh, I imagine that we will someday,” she said lightly. “But we will have had our fun, and gotten even, and ummm ... made our little metaphorical statement so to speak about Harvard.” She began to giggle again. She stood up. “Now,” she said brusquely, “you want to do business.”
“Well, yes.” Von Sackler was nonplussed.
“So what is it that we can do for you? Oh, and before we go any further, I assume, unlike Gardiner, who was only interested in his own academic advancement, that you want a straight shot at the black market.”
“Yes,” von Sackler whispered hoarsely.
“Well, our take on that is forty percent.”
“Madame, how many people are you dealing with?”
“Just Bregman in Philadelphia. We had considered Mauritz in New York, but he’s not, how should I say . . .”
“Vulnerable?”
“Well, yes, that—or perhaps ripe.”
“Ripe?”
“Yes, ripe.”
“Why was Bregman ripe?”
“The Guatemalan incident, of course—murder.”
“He murdered those two workers for McClellan?” Von Sacker had remembered the attack on the jungle camp of the distinguished Mayan archaeologist.
“Bregman didn’t, but his Huaqueros did. When dealers get that close to blood,” the taut smile again, “they . . .”
“Ripen?”
“Precisely. But what I like about you—as I was saying to Tobias the other day—”
“You were speaking to your son about this already?”
“Yes.” Her eyes narrowed. “You see, it’s quite odd, but I just had this hunch about you. Even before I heard about Guth and the directorship. Anyhow, as I was saying to Tobias, you have no field connections really. You’re straight out of the museum. Bregman was dealing always much too directly with the Huaqueros, these damn looters who in turn were spending alternate weeks doing guerrilla warfare. Bregman was getting involved with everything from Sandinistas to God knows what. Too many people, too many causes. The situation was not controllable. Black market archaeology through Bregman was supporting all sorts of revolutions down there. And of course we had no interest in Huaquero objects. We have enough Central American stuff right here for our needs. But Bregman did have the market, especially in Texas, for our pieces. But his whole other thing in the field was just too risky.”
“I see,” said von Sackler. He was utterly amazed.
“So now what is it that you want?”
“The Ancon bundle.”
“Yes. I was afraid of that. It does look quite promising. You know, the one that they opened at Yale had a complete warp of perfectly preserved woven cloth—the colors as brilliant as the day it came off the looms, not to mention some exquisite gold leaf jewelry and ceramics. Tobias feels, by the way, that the Ancon boy is wrapped up with what will prove to be a load of Chavin ceramics. The pot incising on the X rays indicates that, and we have a Dallas man salivating for some Chavin stuff. You know even the Rockefeller collection is very thin on Chavin stuff. And some of these Texas families are absolutely obsessed with out-collecting the Rockefellers or Nathan Cummings. That is their raison d’etre in the antiquities. They’re basically all so tacky. Pretty much like the television show—J.R. and the whole bunch.”
“I see. So why were you afraid when I said the Ancon mummy?” “Well, for Tobias, coming up with a ceramics forgery or gold leaf jewelry is no problem. The replication of the objects is not that difficult, except for the weaving, if it really is as good and as intricate as the Yale one. If it is, I’ll just get a piece from the 1928 expedition. Nobody’s thought about Gelber’s work for years. He was such an ass. I’m the only one who knows what’s in those boxes anyhow. As I was saying, the replication is not the problem. The problem of course is unwrapping the mummy and then rewrapping it with new objects. We can’t be sure if the boy will stand up, so to speak, to such disturbances. In our favor, of course, is that it is an Ancon mummy. The ones from these coastal deserts and arid sierras seem more stable than those from some of the other areas ”
“So what is the worst that can happen?”
“Well, I suppose the worst is if the dear boy falls to pieces on us. If that happened Tobias most likely could patch him up some way or other so he could be rewrapped. I doubt if it would be total disintegration.”
“Hmmm.” Von Sackler walked to a window. His back was to her. “It seems worth the risk, does it not? I mean, what would you say the total value is of the objects in the Ancon mummy? Just a rough estimate.” He turned toward her.
“I don’t know. Tobias feels that the Dallas man would pay at least a quarter of a million for the three ceramic pieces. The weaving—well, the weaving could easily go for that or more if it’s comparable to the Yale piece. Yes, I would say that it is worth the risk of the boy falling to pieces.”
“And you say that you think Tobias, if worst came to worst, could patch him up, at least enough to rebundle.”
“Yes, I’m sure. Tobias has actually dealt with mummies for quite some time. Since he was a youngster he’s been experimenting with the mummification of small animals—birds, mice, you know. So he is not coming to this totally untutored.”
“Yes.” Von Sackler could imagine the delightful adolescent hobby. As other boys built their gunpowder-charged rocket models, Tobias executed small wrens, sucked out their marrow through thin tubing, eviscerated mice, and embalmed tiny carcasses with a variety of solutions in a series of intricate mummification experiments. “Do you suppose, Mrs. Scroop, that we should first discuss this with Tobias, seeing as he is rather central to the work?”
“Why, of course.” Jean Scroop clapped her hands together. She walked into the hallway. “Tobias!” She called toward the back of the house. “Tobias! He’s usually working in his basement lab.” She came back into the room. “I should really serve you something. How about some tea, and I have some nice pastries left over from a luncheon at the Peabody today.”
Indeed! von Sackler thought, the Peabody seemed to be an endless source of supply for the Scroops. Somehow the notion of eating anything in this household where young boys had become conversant with the techniques of mummification was repugnant. “No, I think I’ll decline, thank you.”
“Ah, Tobias!” Jean Scroop exclaimed.
The thin gray man stood in the door. “Hi, Mom. Hi, Mr. von Sackler. Mom said you’d be coming around.”
“Just as we thought, Toby.” Jean Scroop’s eyes glittered triumphantly.
“Well, welcome aboard, Sir!” Tobias stepped forward toward von Sackler and began shaking his hand heartily. “What’s he want, Mom?” He could have been talking to the coach about a new player, asking what position he would play.
“The Ancon boy,” Jean replied.
“Oh, quite a little fella.”
It disturbed von Sackler the way Jean Scroop and now Tobias always referred to the mummy as “the boy” or “little fella.”
“Well, he’s a winner, that one, and high time we started working with mummies. The bundles from Peru are literally loaded. I guess Mom told you about my previous work.” He managed to give a scholarly patina to what was essentially a rather putrid obsession. “Entered a science competition with the project when I was in junior high.”
“Beautifully rendered research and report. He won first prize and he was only thirteen. As good as any Harvard undergraduate work certainly. And if your name had been Cabot or Lowell . . .”
“Now Mom, don’t get started.”
Von Sackler was beginning to perceive the first glimmerings of the dark riddle.
“Tell me, Mr. von Sackler,” Tobias continued, “how’d you get on to Mom and me?”
“A hunch, just a hunch.” He could play this game too.
“Ho! Ho!” Tobias waved his finger. “Takes one to catch one.” There was no way, von Sackler suddenly realized, to feel normal around these two people. They were the most bizarre couple he had ever encountered. He would try not to dwell on their persons but get on with the business of the Ancon mummy.
“Tell me, when can you have the objects ready to go?”
“Well, now,” Tobias said, scratching his head, “it shouldn’t take that long after I establish certain things about the physical state of the boy and . . .”
By the time von Sackler left he knew more than he had ever wanted to know about Peruvian mummy bundles and a variety of embalming techniques. But the business had been negotiated. The percentage had been lowered to thirty percent and a date four days hence had been settled on. Von Sackler had decided that he would, after this project, deal with the Scroops as much as possible over the phone and as little as possible in person. He took a cab immediately to the Ritz where he went directly into the bar and ordered a double Tanqueray martini and tried with each swallow not to think of all the horrid little details which Tobias had so vividly sketched for him. It was quite difficult. He ordered another martini. He would think of Calista. Yes, Calista of the wonderful poem. He knew a woman lovely in her bones. He stopped in horror and set down his drink with a trembling hand. Now even poetry had been ruined for him.
Chapter 27
Nothing in the small fragments box had been wrapped or arranged with any kind of order or care in mind. Everything was in disarray, almost purposeful disarray. Animal bones and lithic fragments were mixed together. Baldwin picked up one of several fragments of tubular bone from what he recognized as very old or extinct mammals— bison, a camel, even a peccary. “Peccary! For God’s sake!” he muttered. “How’d it get this far north?” Each of these tubular bones showed splitting, doubtlessly by man for extraction of marrow, thus confirming human occupation. There indeed were several Asiatic chopping tools and blades including a “skreblo,” or scraper, that were similar to those found in some of the early Paleolithic sites in the Altai mountains of Siberia. There were several points with carefully retouched lateral edges, a Mousterian characteristic of the very early flint work found in Siberia and Europe. There were small plastic bags with charcoal samples to be sent to labs where, Baldwin thought, it would no doubt be carbon dated at about 14,000 B.C. The charcoal samples would be just the frosting on the very old cake. The entire box, even in its confusion, was one frantic gesture toward Paleo- Indian occupation, from the marrow-sucked bones to the Asiatic tools.
