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the French during the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt and later seized by the British. It was purchased by one of the museum’s benefactors and reassembled in the basement as one of the museum’s original exhibits. It must still be there.”
    “And who is this Cahors?” Darling asked.
    “Napoleon brought an army of naturalists and archaeologists with his army when he invaded Egypt. A Cahors led the archaeological contingent. I imagine this fellow is a descendant.”
    Collopy frowned. “What does this have to do with anything?”
    “Don’t you see? This is precisely what we’re looking for!”
    “A dusty old tomb?”
    “Exactly! We make a big announcement of the count’s gift, set an opening date with a gala party and all the trappings, and make a media event out of it.” Menzies looked inquiringly at Rocco.
    “Yes,” Rocco said. “Yes, that could work. Egypt is always popular with the general public.”
    “ Could work? It will work. The beauty of it is that the tomb’s already installed. The Sacred Images exhibition has run its course, it’s time for something new. We could do this in two months—or less.”
    “A lot depends on the condition of the tomb.”
    “Nevertheless, it’s still in place and ready to go. It might only need to be swept out. Our storage rooms are full of Egyptian odds and ends that we could put in the tomb to round out the exhibition. The count is offering plenty of money for whatever restoration is necessary.”
    “I don’t understand,” Darling said. “How could an entire exhibition be forgotten for seventy years?”
    “For one thing, it would have been bricked up—that’s often what they did to old exhibits to preserve them. “ Menzies smiled a little sadly. “This museum simply has too many artifacts, and not enough money or curators to tend them. That’s why I’ve lobbied for years now to create a position for a museum historian. Who knows what other secrets sleep in the long-forgotten corners?”
    A brief silence settled over the room, broken abruptly as Collopy brought his hand down on his desk. “Let’s do it.” He reached for the phone. “Mrs. Surd? Tell the count to release the money. We’re accepting his terms.”

6

    N ora Kelly stood in her laboratory, gazing at a large specimen table covered with fragments of ancient Anasazi pottery. The potsherds were of an unusual type that glowed almost golden in the bright lights, a sheen caused by countless mica particles in the original clay. She had collected the sherds during a summertime expedition to the Four Corners area of the Southwest, and now she had arranged them on a huge contour map of the Four Corners, each sherd in the precise geographical location where it had been found.
    She stared at the glittering array, once again trying to make sense of it. This was the core of her major research project at the museum: tracing the diffusion of this rare micaceous pottery from its source in southern Utah as it was traded and retraded across the Southwest and beyond. The pottery had been developed by a religious kachina cult that had come up from Aztec Mexico, and Nora believed that—by tracing the spread of the pottery across the Southwest—she could thereby trace the spread of the kachina cult.
    But there were so many sherds, and so many C-14 dates, that making all the variables work together was a thorny problem, and she had not even begun to solve it. She stared hard: the answer was there. She just had to find it.
    She sighed and took a sip of coffee, glad she had her basement lab as a refuge from the storm raging outside the museum above. Yesterday it had been the anthrax scare, but today was worse—thanks in large part to her husband, Bill, who had a singular knack for stirring up trouble. He had broken the story in the Times this morning that the powder was, in fact, the museum’s stolen diamond collection, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, pulverized to dust by the thief. The news had caused an