Bound For Eternity Read online

  "The second. I think that's what I mean. It seems to be a gray area."

  "Depends on who you talk to-and where and when they were trained." Ellen replied a little cynically. "Look, I think I can show you the difference, as I see it." She led the way over to her sandbox where she was restoring some ancient Greek vases. "Now this one," she pointed at a little kylix decorated with boxers and jumpers, "this one has been touched up a bit to cover a break-see?" She handed me a magnifying glass.

  I examined the crack, which had been delicately touched up with paint or slip of the same color as the rest of the vase so that it was almost impossible to see the original break.

  "Now look at this one." Ellen pointed to the rim of a large krater, where the floral palmette design was flaking. "The restorer continued the design around the vase even though it was worn away over half the rim. That would be against current conservation philosophy today, but it was perfectly kosher back in the 1940s."

  "So how would you do it today?"

  "I'd tint the rim a color close to that of the original red ocher slip, but not extend the black glazed decoration beyond the original painted design. It should be perfectly clear to the viewer what's original and what's been added for aesthetic reasons. So, tinting a plaster patch so it's not an eyesore is okay-embroidering an ancient artist's design, or adding more of it, is not."

  "That fits with what Sheila Tresler was telling me." I thought for a moment. "So the antefix, and the pectoral you looked at earlier-there's no chance they're original but have been doctored to make them look better? You think they're fake through and through?"

  Ellen was firm. "I think everything about both pieces is all wrong."

  I moved towards the door. Then I turned, remembering my original purpose. "Do you keep a running list of which items are in your lab here for treatment?"

  "Sure. But the easiest way to check is to do a search on temporary location in the database." Quickly, Ellen showed me how to do it on her computer.

  I felt encouraged. Ellen's manner had been not exactly warm, but not as cool as in recent weeks. We'd had a real conversation-maybe things were looking up.

  "Thanks. How about lunch next week?" I asked.

  Ellen was guarded. "Um-next week is going to be really bad. Maybe later?" Darn. Before James, Ellen had never refused slipping in a quick lunch, even

  during exhibit crunches. It looked like she needed more time to forgive me-if

  she ever would.

  ? ? ? ?

  I decided to go over to the library so I could give myself a crash course on the making and detecting of forgeries. Wasn't there a catalogue from the British Museum that had "Fake!" in the title? After some searching on the computerized catalogue, I found it. It was a fat tome, gorgeously illustrated with color plates of notorious fakes such as the terracotta warriors at the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

  How would you go about faking a Greek terracotta antefix, I wondered, turning over the pages. Well, if you were good at your job (as a forger, that is), you did your homework and found out everything you could about the clays and slips used by Greek potters in your period of interest. Then, you mixed raw clays until you had a plausible match, and made your artifact. At the half-dry, or leather-hard stage, you added slip, carefully composed of the same clay that went into the body of the artifact, with additions of iron oxide and other minerals for color. Next, you experimented with primitive kilns until you could fire your pottery at the correct temperature and atmosphere, and your masterpiece was ready for the antiquities market. But wait a minute-if it was fired recently, it would flunk the thermoluminescence test, which gave an approximate date of the last firing.

  After a little more digging, I found a reference to an article by Stuart Fleming from the University of Pennsylvania about this problem. It was in an old issue of the journal Art in America. My diligence was rewarded with the fascinating information that Italian forgers-exceptionally talented artisans trained in the best of Roman and Florentine traditions-took their fake pots to their dentists for a dose of X-rays. The extra radiation made the ceramic appear to be older than it really was.

  Good grief! So to be an expert forger, you needed to be both an artist and a scientist, with an unusual degree of patience to achieve the desired result!

  No wonder there were so many Italians in archaeology and archaeological science classes.

  I went back to the British Museum catalogue. There was a detailed section on the testing of the Shroud of Turin, and how experts had argued about whether there was real human blood or red pigment on the cloth. I read through the entry and sat lost in thought. What if it was a medieval burial shroud, doctored by someone who wanted people to think it was the shroud of Jesus Christ? You could always add pigment for the "bloodstains"-for that matter, you could add blood too!

  I closed the book and returned it to the re-shelving pile. I was pretty sure no one was currently producing fakes in my museum. We had so little space, and we all migrated around so much-it would be impossible to hide that kind of operation. So, if the forger was someone on the staff, his (or her) lab was off-site. Or maybe it was an employee serving as the conduit-forgeries produced somewhere else were being funneled into the museum. That was much more plausible.

  I just have to keep my eyes peeled, and not eliminate anyone.

  Even my best friend.

  CHAPTER 30

  OPENING OF THE MOUTH

  Massachusetts Avenue was choked with buses and students on bicycles weaving in and out of traffic. As an undergrad, I too had tempted fate by riding my ancient Raleigh, an antique three-speed, without a helmet through the streets of Boston.

  After finally going around a large, blue mini-van that had blocked my view for three blocks, I entered the nerd zone-the M.I.T. campus. I was trying to pick up the reconstructed mummy head for the exhibit, but there was no parking anywhere near the lab I wanted. I finally found a meter off Central Square and walked the rest of the way. Passing the Student Union, I recalled its lived-in look during my student days-cubicles furnished with sleeping bags, toothbrushes, and food supplies sufficient for a two-week siege. Some guys holed up in there for the whole semester, coming out like groundhogs in February for a quick weather check.

  Bob Campbell in Computer Science had used the digitized CT scans to produce a sculpture of the mummy child's face and head. I could hardly wait to see it. I pulled the e-mail with directions out of my purse, and got myself oriented. Okay, turn left just after the Student Union-the building I'd just passed-and left at the Chemistry building.

  Computer Science was a modern glass-and-steel edifice, with girders showing so that it looked more like a garage than a classroom building. I spotted numerous students hunched over keyboards or hitting the vending machines.

  A rotund little man met me at the door of the computer lab with a huge grin on his face.

  "Come on in, Lisa." Quickly he bounced ahead of me into his small office and pointed to his masterpiece. "Ta dah!"

  I gasped in wonder.

  The small face looked so real. The gently rounded cheeks were tinted light brown, and the brown eyes caught the light as if they were alive. I walked around it. It was a showstopper. "Tell me how you did it."

  "I can do better than that. See?" Shoving some journals aside, he spread out a stack of printouts. "I've prepared some diagrams you can use in the exhibit that show how I built up the skull-the bony parts-from the CT slices. Then we used ultra-sound data from different ages and populations to get the tissue depths." He pointed to the blue markers on one of the intermediate models.

  "But how did you know the shape of the soft, boneless parts, the ears and the nose?" I asked.

  "They're approximations, based on averages. But the underlying bone structure gives you a lot to go on. And we've come along way since the days when they used corpses to get the tissue depths. See, the models they produced then all looked like dead people."

  I laughed appreciatively. "This is dynamite stuff. It
will really enhance the exhibit." I admired the finished sculpture again. "How did you decide what color to use for the skin? I mean Roman Egypt was inhabited by Semites, sub-Saharan Africans, Greeks, Romans-many different people working and traveling around the same region."

  "Well, I've got this friend at the Smithsonian who's a physical anthropologist. I send some digitized images to him, and he said it looked like a child of mixed race. Mostly Caucasian, but the prognathism-that's protrusion of the whole jaw, not just buck teeth-indicates some Negroid blood. Maybe the kid had an African mom and a Roman father?"

  I thought about the probable wife of Ateius the Roman wine-merchant. She could be anyone. Was she Roman, too? Or was she Egyptian, or Nubian? Was the child from the marriage with Ateius, or an earlier one? It was unlikely that we would ever find out.

  I told Campbell about the inscription on the mummy tag.

  "Hey, what a find! Will you put all this information in the exhibit?"

  "Some of it," I replied, thinking about the implications. I could certainly write about the wine merchant, but the question of racial background was a can of worms. I could just see the headline: "Boston Museum says Pharaohs were Black!" The Anthropology Department would have a fit. Victor would have a fit. No, I wanted to keep my job. Not all the information had to go in the exhibit labels. I'd just put in some language about how the Fayum oasis was a melting pot, a cosmopolitan center with people of many races living there or passing through.

  Bob helped me wrap the sculpture with layers of old newspapers and masking tape and gave me a folder for the diagrams. I thanked him profusely. "We'll credit you in the text and the catalogue," I promised. "And then James and I are going to do an article-maybe for the Journal of Archaeological Science-we'd like you to co-author that with us."

  "No problem," Bob said, clasping his hands around his comfortable belly. "You know where to find me."

  I swaddled the mummy child's head with my car blanket like a sleeping baby and strapped it into Emma's car seat. The result looked a little odd.

  What would the police say if they stopped me and examined my cargo?

  ? ? ? ?

  That night I slept lightly and dreamed in Technicolor. It was the first dream that didn't qualify as a nightmare that I'd had for ages...

  I was walking the streets of Karanis, a Roman town in the Fayum oasis region that my conscious mind knew had been excavated by the University of Michigan.

  The dream town was alive and populated with Romans, Greeks, Egyptians, and Nubians. Busy people filled the streets, going to market or to work in the fields. I passed a prosperous, two-story mud-brick house that had no windows facing the street. Through an open arch I could see water dripping into a rectangular basin. Suddenly a little boy wearing a short tunic rushed out. I recognized him. His skin was a beautiful coffee color, and his jaw protruded slightly, as if he needed braces.

  He ran up and hugged my knees. "Thank you, thank you!" he cried, looking up at me with adoring brown eyes.

  "What for?" I asked.

  "For making me live forever! My father the wine merchant thanks you, and my mother, and my uncles..." He hugged my legs again and pulled me into the courtyard with one brown hand. Then, just like an ordinary child he said, "Come and see my room!"

  ? ? ? ?

  I woke up abruptly, thinking about the little boy's room. He had beautifully dyed linen covers on his wooden bed. His toys were wooden dolls, ivory dice, and small ceramic cups for storing beads and rolling the dice. I sat up in excitement. The museum had some of those items! I could recreate the interior of a house in Roman Egypt; I could add the footstool, some dice, even a wooden headrest!

  I turned on my light long enough to scribble some notes.

  As I drifted back to sleep, I wondered what had happened to the child who never had a chance to grow up.

  CHAPTER 31

  "...TAKE YOURSELF OFF, FOR GEB PROTECTS ME..." (SPELL 33)

  I was crouched over my table of artifacts the next day when Susie interrupted me.

  "Got a moment?"

  "Sure. What's up?"

  Susie slid into the only other chair. "Carl is really acting weird. He was here late last night-for no good reason that I could tell-and he followed me out to the parking lot!"

  I thought about it. Why would Carl being working late, right after his Pueblo show was fully mounted?

  "That's a little odd. But I had the impression Victor's given him a new assignment because he's seemed so smug the last few days. Maybe he's earning extra Brownie points." Unlike me. I still had the feeling that Victor and I were not in tune, and that I had little chance to improve the situation.

  Susie was still not happy. "Well, I'd feel better if I didn't have the feeling he's keeping track of my movements. I found a new lunch spot-you know that Thai place, the Jade Palace, on Mass. Ave.? And two days later he was there, too, slurping up noodles! I can't get rid of the guy."

  "Try being nice to him," I suggested. "If he's jealous of your relationship with Victor, that might tame him a bit." And stop playing one guy off against the other, I added silently.

  "With my luck, he'll just misinterpret any kindness, and think he has a second chance with me," grumbled Susie. "But, you know, he's here at odd times when I'm not-like last Sunday evening, after I closed up, I saw him go back into the museum."

  I did think that was peculiar-especially after all the staff concern about security after-hours. But I didn't really want to continue this conversation.

  "He does have his own research to squeeze in. He's trying to publish part of his dissertation." The first scholarly article-essential in the hunt for an academic job. Carl didn't mind doing museum work for a while, but he really wanted to be a famous professor some day.

  "Why doesn't he go to the library, then?" Susie was much too sharp. She left while I was still trying to think of a response.

  Carl was trying to break into the major journal American Antiquity-he had bragged about knowing the editor, that it was a sure thing. All he had to do was revise the damn thesis, and fine-tune some of his figures.

  But I agreed with Susie. I myself got more accomplished at the library. The archaeology core collection was non-circulating, so everything you needed was close at hand. Just like my graduate school archaeology library, which was so secluded that the department head liked to cruise around late at night and pat her favorite books just to make sure they were still there-and quietly take stock of which graduate students were still hitting the books instead of relaxing like normal people. Such libraries had no telephones, so you could really think and write without distractions. None of us had much room in our offices for books-Carl and I both kept most of our personal libraries at home.

  Then I had another thought. Was Carl really stalking Susie, or was she just trying to cast suspicion on him? And if Susie was trying to make Carl look bad, what was she up to?

  ? ? ? ?

  I was hard at work on the most recent draft of my exhibit labels when I remembered I had never asked Ginny about the locations of my missing items. Perhaps I had a psychological block against doing it, knowing Ginny could be prickly and territorial. And I sensed she didn't like me very much-if she liked any of us.

  I got up from my chair, and then sat down again abruptly. Remember what Sheila had said? I should go to the police. I had potentially valuable information about artifacts in strange locations and things missing that shouldn't be. But what if the confusion was just part of updating the database? My colleagues would be furious if I blew the whistle on something that had nothing to do with Marion's murder.

  On the other hand, if one of the staff was involved in something criminal and I got in the way...

  I'd compromise. I would ask Ginny about some objects, but say nothing about the switched mummy portraits. That information I would share with Sergeant McEwan as soon as I could.

  I picked up my notes and took the back stairs down to Registration.

  I found Ginny hunched over her computer
.

  "Ginny?" I began. Ginny glanced up and stopped typing.

  "How's your daughter?" she asked unexpectedly. That was promising-I couldn't remember Ginny ever asking something personal.

  "Almost normal. Thank goodness, kids recover faster than adults," I replied. "How's your brother doing?"

  Ginny made a face and reached for her cigarettes. "He's a loser. He's lost another job. The less said about him the better."

  Feeling grateful that I was not that brother and subject to Ginny's harsh judgment, I switched the subject to safer ground. "I'm having trouble locating artifacts for my Egyptian exhibit, and I was hoping you could help..."

  Like an angry goose guarding her pond, Ginny went into attack mode. "Don't you know that I'm supposed to pull all the artifacts until we get a replacement for Marion? You should have just given me the list. You're interfering with my job!"