The God Collector Page 6

  “I’ll say.” She grinned a little. “See, now you’ve got me curious. You don’t like talking about family, so you mentioned it? I’m pretty sure Freud would have something to say about that.”

  “Oh God, not Freud,” he said, shaking his head. “Help?”

  He ran a hand through his hair, looking awkward enough that she was willing to help him. It was hard to be nervous about talking to him when he’d walked into a conversational trap he himself had set.

  “All right, I think we’ve done enough talking to satisfy my bosses,” she said, taking a few olives from the appetizer plate. “How about we forget Freud and talk about something that won’t embarrass either of us?”

  “Yes. Please.” Adler took a sip of beer and settled back in his chair a little. “Tell me more about that mural you were working on. Most of the exhibits have murals framed on canvas, don’t they? But you were painting it directly onto the wall.”

  “Well, it’s all about practicality, really,” she said. Adler still hadn’t touched the appetizers—another little detail for her mental portrait. He hadn’t eaten much at the party, either. Maybe it was a question of comfort and personal boundaries. “When it’s a traveling exhibit, like King Tut’s treasures, any large graphics that go with it will be printed on fabric and displayed stretched on a frame. It’s a cheap way to fill up your wall space. But while Treasures of the Middle Kingdom is going to go on the road later, it’s something we put together ourselves, not a loan. It needs to make an impression.” She shrugged a little. “When you print a painting on fabric, especially when you’re blowing up a smaller image to, say, ten feet by twenty, it loses a lot of vibrancy and detail. Printed versions can go on the road, but for this…for this, it has to be perfect. It will be perfect.”

  “And what happens to perfection when the exhibit closes? Will it be painted over?”

  “Probably. Or scraped off.” His brow furrowed at that, and she shrugged. “It depends on whether they reuse the dividing walls they built. If not, the whole thing might go into storage, but if they need the walls for another exhibit it’ll probably get scraped.”

  There was an odd look in Adler’s eyes that she couldn’t quite decipher, and she wondered if she’d somehow said the wrong thing. It wasn’t as if the mural were somehow unique or special; it was just a copy of a picture made for the exhibit. Maybe he was objecting to the waste?

  He didn’t say anything, though, and for a moment she struggled to fill the sudden gap in the conversation. “I know it sounds a little strange, but it’s really not,” she said as lightly as she could. “We’re used to it. Every painted-on mural goes on a temporary wall anyway. To paint an actual wall, we need special dispensation from the museum’s board of directors.”

  The corner of Adler’s mouth twitched a little. “Is the bureaucracy really that bad?”

  “It’s not the bureaucracy—it’s the building. It’s not such a big problem in the newer wings, but the main body of the museum was built out of a hall from the World’s Fair in 1893. It’s considered a historic site, and the Heritage Association gets really picky about whatever we do. Last month someone taped a cat poster over our dumbwaiter door, and the whole department got angry letters.”

  The corner of his mouth wavered and moved upwards a little. Some of the lines smoothed out of his skin when he smiled, she noticed. “Why does the art department have a dumbwaiter?”

  “Our loft used to be part of the offices for some big cheeses of the Fair, and they had dumbwaiter shafts built in so people could send up hot dinners while they were working late. Ours still works too,” she added, grinning a little. “The tray’s gone, but the pulley and rope are pretty strong. If someone needed to hide something in a hurry and didn’t mind breaking it, they’d drop it down the dumbwaiter shaft and get in through the ground-floor panel to clean up the mess later. Apparently it was a really popular way to get rid of illegal booze back in the twenties.”

  Adler laughed for real this time. For a moment his posture loosened and the taut strain went out of the lines of his form; with shoulders relaxed, head cocked and a grin on his face, he looked younger than before. His eyes had a warmth the rest of his colors didn’t—halfway between tawny and auburn, with a glint of reflected light in them that bypassed all her mental Pantone charts and went straight to whiskey. Old whiskey, the good stuff that could make your head swim if you weren’t careful with it.

  Oh Christ, this was a dangerous line of thinking. Clearly Aki had been right about her needing to get out more. Even as something in her chest gave a traitorous little flip-flop, she swallowed hard and smiled as calmly as she could.

  It had been a while since she’d gone out to lunch with a man who wasn’t Aki. Her last relationship had ended by mutual consent when both of them realized that they were sticking together purely out of boredom and inertia—not the stuff dreams are made of. Throwing herself into her work had been one way to stave off loneliness and avoid getting herself into another mess. But if she was reacting like this just because a donor was good-looking and friendly, then she had good reason to pull herself back. This was how flaky artists, not professionals, acted.

  If she wasn’t professional, she wasn’t anything.

  She was answering one of his questions about the department’s reconstructions of tomb paintings when a flash of color caught her eye. It was gold—no, the yellow was too pale and desaturated—bronze, real prehistoric bronze, not a color typically found in Loop bars. She turned her head, frowning a little as she tried to catch the source of it.

  It was one of the TVs. It was showing a news broadcast, the voices of the anchors almost drowned out by the noise in the dining room. Inset behind the two reporters was a picture of an ancient bronze shield, looking vaguely familiar and out of place next to the coifed pair.

  “—taken a shocking turn,” one of the reporters was saying. “Sources within the university’s administrative branch have informed us that far from being the simple act of vandalism originally believed, the events of last night were a deliberate attack on one of the city’s most hallowed institutions.”

  Theo’s stomach clenched. Adler was frowning a little, and she realized belatedly that she’d trailed off in the middle of a sentence. “I’m sorry,” she said quickly. “The news—”

  His gaze followed hers to the TV, and his jaw tightened. The screen was now showing the front of a familiar stone archway.

  It wasn’t her museum, but she knew it well enough anyway—the Oriental Institute of Chicago, known for its collection of artifacts related to the ancient Near East. It was an odd place, quiet and dim, its galleries filled with out-of-the-way corners where a girl could get comfortable with a sketch pad. Now the news crawl below the image was talking about crime statistics and the reporter made that face they made when serious stories didn’t involve murder or anything else exciting.

  “—detected the alarm shortly after three o’clock,” she said, “by which point the collection had already been emptied. Shards of stone were found on the floor of the gallery, but we don’t know at this time whether the stolen items have in fact been destroyed—”

  Theo took a deep breath as she fought the urge to look away. “Not another one,” she muttered. The waiter refilled her water glass, but she didn’t touch it.

  The camera was panning across what she recognized as the Hall of Syria. It was a wreck: cases smashed, statues toppled, a rare early Christian manuscript slashed to pieces. The reporters talked on, discussing distraction tactics and whether the Collector—if this was indeed his work—harbored some kind of hatred for museums. “Someone goes to this much effort to make a mess, I’m thinking there’s got to be some issues there,” one of them observed to the other, who nodded.

  The screen cut to a commercial and Theo finally turned away. A dull ache was throbbing in the back of her neck, and she massaged the muscle with the heel of her palm. It helped to hav
e something to do with her hands.

  “Jesus Christ,” she murmured. The images seemed to be burned into her brain. The Collector had wrecked items he couldn’t steal before, but this… She pressed her fingertips against her eyelids, making starbursts erupt in her vision.

  “So…” Adler’s voice was quiet, “…the Collector?”

  “The Collector,” she managed to say. “Or someone like him—her? Them?”

  “I’d heard stories,” he said, toying with his fork. His eyes were fixed on her, though, and that tension was back in his shoulders and stark lines. “It’s unavoidable in certain circles these days. Some kind of cat burglar who attacks collections of Eastern artifacts and destroys what he can’t take. Though the Columbian’s board of directors have seemed eager to reassure its donors that everything’s secure.”

  Did that comment have a hook in it? She didn’t know. Suddenly she didn’t have the energy to think it through; it felt like her tendons had been cut, leaving her slumped awkwardly at the table.

  “We’ve been safe so far,” she managed to say. “We have a good security team. But I-I don’t think anyone’s gonna be too happy. Someone’ll hear about this”—she jerked her head towards the TV—“and it’ll be all over the grapevine in minutes. They’ll be double-checking everything, setting up new checkpoints.” She shook her head. “It’s gonna be a mess.”

  For a moment, there was silence between them. Adler’s hands were flat on the table as he leaned forward slightly, the pressure leaving paler patches under his skin, and a few lines appeared in his face as his jaw tightened. Theo took a quick swallow of ice water and tried to get her nerves under control.

  It didn’t work. The Columbian had done a lot of business with the Oriental Institute, cosponsoring shows and making trades of certain artifacts. The thought of THS203 sprawled half-out of a cracked case, its bandages ripped, made her throat close.

  “I should go,” she said. Adler frowned. “I’m sorry, I probably should. The museum takes this kind of thing very seriously.”

  The words sounded canned, but they must have made some kind of sense because Adler nodded. “All right,” he said. “I hope this won’t cause your department any problems.”

  “I wish I could promise it won’t.”

  She tried to ask for the check, but Adler insisted on taking care of it. He seemed concerned about her reaction to the news and asked a few times if she was feeling all right; she tried to reassure him, but it was hard to keep a lid on her nerves. Her hands trembled a little as they drove back towards the museum.

  Work on the mural had stopped. Five team members were gathered around Jake Stiegler, who was streaming footage from a local news site through his phone. Aki glanced up as Theo slipped in next to him. “How was your date?” he whispered.

  “Fine, and it wasn’t a date. I came back as soon as I heard.” She nodded to the phone. “How’d you guys hear?”

  “Document Preservation heard it first. They passed it to Anthropology, who passed it to Egyptology, who passed it to us.” Aki shook his head. “The board probably knows by now. Ten bucks says the exhibit gets postponed while they reevaluate everything.”

  Theo grimaced. Postponed was just one step from canceled. If the board thought the museum’s security was in danger of being compromised, they would be willing to lose the revenue of a big exhibit if it meant protecting the rest of the collection. Six months of work down the drain.

  She watched the newscast as long as she could stand it, but that wasn’t long. The images of smashed cases and destroyed relics did something strange to her stomach. “I’ll be back in a few,” she murmured to Aki. “I need to go check on something.”

  “Saying hi to your friends?” Aki whispered back.

  “No comment.”

  She wasn’t in the labs so often these days, but she’d spent plenty of time on sketches there a few months back, and she still had fond memories of the place. Her boys were right where she’d last seen them, arranged on shelves in a climate-controlled cabinet, staring calmly back at her.

  “Hey there, guys,” Theo murmured as she patted the glass. The three dozen statuettes looked back and didn’t answer. Just like always.

  They came in various shapes and sizes, all obviously handmade by someone without much technical skill. Skill, though, wasn’t what made the experts so excited. The sheer number and variety of the shabtis, especially in an early Middle Kingdom burial, were unheard of. The thirty-six in front of her were barely a fraction of the cache.

  Aki knew she had a fondness for the little guys, but he didn’t share it. Geez, no wonder, he’d said when he found out. Men who don’t talk back. She’d rolled her eyes at him and left it at that. It was almost impossible to explain that the shabtis did talk. Sort of.

  Seven were the classic mummiform shabtis, hands crossed over their chests, their bodies bound into stiff, upright shapes and scored with shallow lines to indicate the shapes of the bandaging. Formulaic spells were etched into their bodies, calling on the gods to favor their owner. The next four were unusual specimens: unpainted clay figurines in the shape of overseers, more spells chiseled into their bodies. The rest were soldiers in various poses of drawing a bow, tying a sandal, kneeling to pray or fastening a cloak. Every single one had the lines of crude hieroglyphics etched into its back or its chest—the only thing marking them all as part of the same cache.

  The academics had all kinds of theories about how the shabtis had been made and why and by whom. Models of workers were common grave goods in the early Middle Kingdom, but almost none had been made of clay, and they never featured the strange prayers that were carved into these specimens. Even Dr. Van Allen had been seen to raise an eyebrow over the subject.

  But to Theo, veteran of art school and project deadlines, they looked like end-of-the-semester work. The sculptor had been making a few of this, a few of that, and then throwing in a couple of yet another type and hoping numbers would make up for the fact that he appeared to have been drunk when he was writing the hieroglyphs. Three of the little guys had gaping holes in their chests, with dimpled marks in the remaining clay where a wad of some long-gone organic matter must have been stuffed to pad them out.

  Working fast and working sloppy, then, but determined to make as many as possible. It literally was a matter of life and death.

  But, hey, that wasn’t their fault, was it? They didn’t mean to hurt anyone, and they certainly hadn’t given anyone any trouble. Smiling, she patted the glass again, bonding a little with that ancient sculptor. “Been there and done that, brother,” she said softly. She bet he’d be happy to know how long his work had lasted.

  She leaned her forehead against the glass and looked into the eyes of the closest shabti. He was soldier form, holding a bow and arrow. Half of his face had sloughed off years ago, leaving a single eye with only a dot of Pacific-blue paint in it. Given the other members of the collection, she guessed the soldier had been made early on, when the sculptor thought he had more time to spend on the details. The face was crudely modeled, with a stub of a nose and no mouth at all, but something about the tilt of the one eye and the low, relaxed shoulders spoke to Theo. The little model looked…amused, almost. In a calm way. He wasn’t exactly having a ball, but he was in a good place and taking things as they came.

  With just a few details, some anonymous man four thousand years ago had made something that could still evoke emotion in her. It might not have made it to the realm of the gods, but the shabti still had life.

  “Good for you,” she told it.

  Chapter Four

  I didn’t think it was history when I was doing it. I thought I didn’t want to die or have my expedition declared a failure by my king. Later, the libraries would tell me different—that it was a historic moment, a turning point in world affairs. Historic moments always smell like shit and dirt.

  ~From the personal journal of Aelf
red the Black, circa 1191 ACE (fragment)

  The morning dawned gray and cold. A fresh inch of snow covered the city, fat flakes still drifting down lazily on the chilly wind off the lake, and Theo put on two jackets before leaving her apartment. No Aki came knocking that morning, which didn’t surprise her. His hair gel would freeze.

  The whole city seemed reluctant to wake up. Traffic on Lake Shore Drive was sluggish, and the holiday cheer scattered throughout the Loop seemed tired and shrill against the gray sky. The keycard reader on the Columbian’s south staff entrance had an actual icicle hanging from it.

  Inside, the museum was unhappily beginning its day. Pipes groaned and creaked as extra heat pumped through to bring the place back to life. Theo shared the elevator with a man holding a tray of dead pine martens. The smell of formaldehyde was overwhelming, and she tried not to breathe too deeply as the elevator made its agonizingly slow crawl up to the eaves of the building.

  The loft had the air of a wake. People gathered in small clusters and talked quietly, their expressions grim or worried or simply confused. The board had convened; now it was time to wait and see.

  She sipped her coffee as she opened her email. Twelve messages, most of them work related: a list of the winners of the employee raffle, an angry note about a missing lunch cc’d to the entire top floor, a message from sadler@adlerfinancial.com and three new security bulletins. Wait, what?

  Theo eyed her inbox, trying to decide which of the messages she wanted to open first. Personal issues versus professional issues…tough call. She closed her eyes and clicked randomly.

  From: Mark Zimmer

  To: All

  Subj: Re: Security bulletin 2.0

  Addendum to previous bulletin—

  REMINDER: All forms of social media are considered “issuing a public statement”. Even if your profile is set to Private, somebody will find a way to share it. Until further notice, please DO NOT discuss the so-called Collector robberies, museum security or internal museum policy of any kind in public venues such as Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Tumblr, icanhas.cheezburger, etc. For a partial list of prohibited topics and venues, see the attached file.