I dialed Harry Hinton’s cell phone number. “Where are you?”

“Stuck behind a four-car pileup on the FDR Drive, just below Fourteenth Street.”

“Think you can get Clem to the hotel, get her something to eat, let her put her feet up for half an hour, and get her to the Museum of Natural History by seven-thirty?”

I heard him ask if she was game and he got back on to assure me he could. “Well, we’re down to only one guard to worry about,” I told Mike and Mercer. “Traffic’s bad and she wants a bit of a rest. No way they can make it before this place closes, so that will give us some time to get started. Let’s find out which door they keep open so staff can come and go after hours. Harry’ll call when they leave the hotel and one of you can walk Clem in.”

Mamdouba was less than pleased to see us so near to closing time. His expression soured when I handed him the subpoena.

“Must I go to court?” he asked, reading the language on the small white document.

“No. You can see that the foreman of the grand jury modified the request. Instead of a personal appearance before them, you can satisfy your legal obligation by giving me everything we ask for. That’s why my office called your assistant this morning, so you’d have the papers ready.”

“Let me see what we’ve got for you.” He left us in his colorfully decorated circular office and retreated to his assistant’s desk. When he returned, he had an armload of papers.

The big grin returned to his face. “So, here you can begin.” He unfolded a Xeroxed copy of a museum floor plan that stretched beyond the edges of his desk blotter. He ran his index finger from the Central Park West entrance door through the narrow lines that led into display rooms to the left of the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Hall as he talked.

“Now, what you see here no longer exists like this. It’s become the Hall of Biodiversity, as you know. But you can use this-”

“Wait a minute.” Mike bent down and looked at the date below the name of the architectural firm that had done the plan. “This diagram was printed in 1963. You’ve torn up and rebuilt this place five times since then.” He tapped the desk with his fist. “And we don’t want the tourist version, Mr. Mamdouba. It’s got to be current and it’s got to be complete. I want details of everything that’s below the ground floor and whatever is above the fourth floor.”

“Mr. Chapman, there are seven hundred twenty-three rooms in this museum. You’ll be here for a week.”

“I gotta be somewhere for a week, and so far nobody’s suggested Paris. Get me everything.”

Mike pulled up a chair to the side of Mamdouba’s desk and began to fan out all the wrinkled maps that diagrammed the mishmash of corridors and stairwells in the museum’s twenty-three interconnected buildings.

“But, but you can’t do that here,” the curator sputtered at him.

“Because?”

“We’ve got to have a meeting. A bit of an emergency.”

“With people from the Met, about the exhibition breaking up?”

“Exactly.”

“Is Mr. Thibodaux coming?”

“No, no. Not since he tendered his resignation. He’s got nothing more to do with this. Some of the others from the Met are already here, and Miss Drexler is on her way with Pierre’s files. I’ll need this room, Mr. Chapman.”

“Park us where you want us, Mr. Mamdouba. We’re all yours.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Right now. We got a lot of territory to cover and-”

“Yes, but I understand you’re even bringing in help from overseas,” he said quietly.

Mike met Mamdouba’s supercilious smirk with one of his own. “I’m a patsy for reunions. Love it when the whole family gets together every now and then. We’ll stay all night if we have to, sir. Is that a problem for you?”

“Of course it is. I have to keep the guards with you-”

“Likewe’re the security risk? Those guys have been sleeping on the job for aeons. There’s more life in your dead T. rex than in the whole passel of mopes somebody stuffed and left guarding your treasures. Tell you what, you can check my pockets when I leave, if that’s your concern. Mercer and I are not much on collecting crabs in formaldehyde, and Coop here has more jewels than she needs. What we could use is a quiet place to look over these lists.”

Mike picked several sheaves of paper out of the large pile and handed them to Mercer and me while he continued to search for a more up-to-date floor plan. The directory I was holding appeared to be a comprehensive inventory of categories of collections. It was several hundred pages thick, bound together with a large metal clamp.

I peered over at Mercer’s folder, which was equally weighty. It listed names of donors, going back almost a century, and the specimens they had contributed to the museum.

“Is there anything that itemizes your collections by name and refers to the storage areas or display cases they’re in?”

“Everything that’s now on exhibit is computerized. You’ll find that printout here, too,” Mamdouba said, thumbing through the stack he had given to Mike.

“Like that only leaves us looking for the other ninety percent?”

“Well, we’re trying to get that all into the system, Miss Cooper. It’s a dreadfully difficult process. Two million butterflies, five million gall wasps, fifty million bones. Is that the kind of thing you’re interested in?”

“Fiftymillion? How many of them are human?”

“They’re mostly mammals, Detective. The numbers are in these folders that my assistant organized for you.”

“Settle us in somewhere. It’s gonna be a long night. And one of those magnetized passes-we’ll need to borrow one in case we go to the basement.”

Mamdouba was quiet for a few moments, undoubtedly trying to decide whether to engage in a battle with us. With obvious reluctance, he went into his desk drawer and handed Mike a plastic pass with a VIP guest label on it. He was thinking, it seemed to me, about what space he could stick us in temporarily that would cause the least interference or notice. “Come down the hall after me, please.”

He led us to an empty office about five doors away from his corner room. It was sparsely furnished, except for the shelves of mollusks that covered three walls from floor to ceiling. “If this is acceptable, I’ll check on you later.”

Limpets, snails, mussels, and oysters, all looking very gray in their pickled juice, watched over us as we set to work spreading out the floor plans on the empty desktop. “Start looking?” Mike asked.

Mercer sat on the window ledge, resting one of his long legs against an open desk drawer. “I’d concentrate on the level below the ground floor and the area up on five, above the offices,” he said, handing Mike a red felt-tipped pen. “They’ve got to be the least populated spaces when the museum is shut down. Look for unmarked rooms or closets and circle ‘em so we can take a peek.”

“And compare the different generations of maps,” I added. “See if something has been reconfigured and whether it’s accessible now or not.”

“Man, we’re gonna have to come back with comfy shoes. We got miles to cover in here.”

I made myself comfortable on the floor and looked up at Mercer. “You and I need to cross-reference what we find. Why don’t you start looking to see whether there are any familiar names from this case? Like is the Gerst collection mentioned, or anything about Erik Poste’s father? Maybe there are references to items on loan from the Met, like the mummies Timothy Gaylord was talking about.”

More than two hours went by and we were still drowning in paper. Mamdouba knocked on the door and pushed it ajar without saying a word.

“We keeping you?”

“On the contrary, Mr. Chapman. Just to let you know some of us will be here working late as well, in case that’s helpful to you.”

We had caught the attention of some of the staffers, and they were all probably too curious to leave when they stood the chance of seeing in which direction we might be moving.