That got Mike’s attention. “Clem? What do you know about Clem?”

“I heard Mr. Zimmerly mention her to you just now. What do I know about her?” Gaylord removed the pipe from his mouth and swiveled on the chair to answer Mike. “A real pain in the ass, Detective. I know her name is Clem, and she was fascinated with this Natural History mummy because he’d come from the Restaradora Mine. I believe she told me her father was a miner.”

Of course. Miner. Forty-niner. And his daughter, Clementine.

“Why did you find her so difficult?”

“Ms. Cooper, we run an art museum. The greatest in the world. It’s not a haven for activists and bleeding hearts whose mission is restoring the karma of people who’ve been dead for hundreds of centuries. We’re a shrine to the most superb paintings and sculpture ever created, masterpieces from every significant culture in the world.”

Gaylord had both elbows on the desk, his pipe bobbing in my direction. “That young woman hounded my staff mercilessly. What did she think we were going to do-send fifty thousand objects back to Cairo just to satisfy her and undo the mummy’s curse?”

“She wasn’t really inter-”

“May I remind you? The Temple of Dendur-that magnificent structure, the crown jewel of the Met-that entire monument would have been submerged under water when the Aswan Dam was built. We saved that temple, dammit. We brought it here in boxes-six hundred eighty-two of them. One for each carved piece of rock. Most of the treasures we have would have been destroyed if left in their own war-torn and decaying civilizations.”

“But the people themselves, Mr. Gaylord. I understood that Clem’s concern was with the remains of people.”

His free hand slammed on the desk. “Then what the hell does that have to do with me and my colleagues? We’re as different from a natural history museum as night and day-in function, in purpose, in style. Clem and her Eskimos, Clem and her sacred Indian burial grounds-they’re all Mamdouba’s problems, not ours.”

“These things don’t trouble you?”

“Mr. Chapman, I can’t change these facts, these histories. It’s quite simple. European culture has always been venerated in art museums. The culture of aboriginal people was relegated, like curiosities of science, to natural history museums.”

Gaylord stood up and replaced the pipe in his mouth. “There is a chasm between these two New York institutions that is far wider than the park that divides us geographically. In fact, the reason you find us all here today is because we’re trying to reverse the disaster that Thibodaux started. We’d like to call off this joint exhibition.”

“But there’s so much invested in it already.”

“Not nearly as much as Pierre had anticipated. UniQuest, the company that was giving us most of the commercial backing, is probably going to pull the plug. We got a call from Los Angeles today. Quentin Vallejo has put a moratorium on spending for the moment.”

If Nina had been trying to reach me with that news, I would have no way of knowing since my phone had been dead since the time we entered this basement area.

“A financial decision?”

“Basically, yes. I don’t think any of us shared Pierre’s enthusiasm for the plan. Besides, UniQuest is afraid of the bad publicity because of the Grooten murder. And apparently, while I was away last weekend, a man fell off the roof of the Met. They didn’t like that much, either.”

“Did you know him? Pablo Bermudez, I mean.”

He bit on the pipe stem. “Hard worker. Always busy. Never had much to say.”

Gaylord didn’t seem to care deeply about the human factor. Lucky Pablo didn’t splatter blood on any of the canvases when he hit the ground.

“So what will become of these offices and the objects that are here?”

“Anna Friedrichs is upstairs now, talking with Mamdouba. She’s going to try to convince him to carry on with his own bestiary show. He doesn’t need our input to pull this off. If we dissolve this union quickly and easily, we’ll start to transfer the Metropolitan’s objects back into our own quarters.”

How do you secure a potential crime scene that is closeted away somewhere within hundreds of thousands of square feet, when you haven’t yet identified the exact location? Better still, how do you do the same to two areas? I didn’t want anything moved out until we had a chance to examine every possible hiding place under this vast roof.

“You know,” Gaylord said, walking around us to open the door, “that Bermudez fellow was first hired by Bellinger. I think he lived up near the Cloisters. If I remember correctly, he’d been the super in Hiram’s building, which is how he was recommended to work with us. Maybe Hiram knows something about the man.”

I remembered the obit said he had lived with his family in Washington Heights.

Gaylord walked, hands in pockets and head down, along the hallway to get back to the joint exhibition office. Peering after him, I could see that Bellinger and Poste were gone.

I called Zimm’s name, and the bespectacled student emerged from a lab two doors away.

“Have you seen these guys?” I asked, thumbing my finger toward the empty room.

“They left a while ago. I told them I had another e-mail from Clem. She said she might be in town as early as tonight. She said Katrina must have found the vault she was looking for.”

Mike, Mercer, and I were huddled in the corner outside Zimm’s office.

“I’ve got the subpoena to hand to Mamdouba for the floor plan and list of rooms. The museum closes at five forty-five. That’s half an hour. Clem’s already telling people that she may get to town tonight. Why don’t we have Hinton drive her up here and bring her into the place when there’s no one around to see her. Then-”

“We’d still have to get her past a security guard.”

“Like any one of them is going to have a clue?” Mike smirked. “The place will be emptying out for the night. Mercer, you can meet her outside the entrance. The guard’ll be so busy dealing with Mercer and looking at his shiny gold badge that he won’t even notice Clem. We need an insider to get us around here. Zimm’s good, but he has no idea what we’d be looking for, necessarily. Clem would recognize the significance of anything she and Katrina discussed. She’s snooped everywhere, I’m sure.”

“You think Mamdouba will let us stay late, after closing hours?” Mercer asked.

“Other people are in here doing their work.”

“You trust him? You ready to take him into our confidence about having Clem here?” Mike asked.

I responded by looking at each of them. “What do you guys think?”

Mike wasn’t ready to trust anyone. “Let’s get her here first. One of us will sniff around the attic with Coop, looking at bones. The other one will hold hands with an Eskimo in a quiet room till the coast is clear and she can show us what she knows.”

I called Laura’s number and asked her to put Clem on. “You just missed them. You can reach them on Detective Hinton’s cell phone. He was on his way to the hotel with Clem. She was getting tired.”

I wrote down the number she gave me. “Any messages?”

“Call Nina at home tonight. It’s pretty important.” That would be the UniQuest funding story. “Sarah wants to talk to you later if you’ve got some time. Eve Drexler called. I recognized her name from the case so I asked whether I could help.”

“What’d she want?”

“To see whether I could give her a telephone number to reach Clem.”

“What’d you tell her?”

“You taught me well. Told her I didn’t know who that was and that I’d be happy to ask you. She told me not to bother you with it.”

Eve was getting impatient with the e-mails. She wanted to talk to Clem. Or was she calling on Thibodaux’s behalf? She was obviously spreading the news that Clem had planted with her about Katrina and the police investigation.