Now Remo was in the museum, finding out, and finding out very little at that. The carvings seemed very Egyptian, yet Egyptians used softer stone. These stones were hard.
Two guards stood before a large unmarked door at the north end of the display room.
"I'm looking for a special stone," Remo said. "It's been marked over recently."
"You can't go in," said one guard.
"So it's in there?"
"I ain't saying that. Anyone who goes in needs special permission from the Antiquities Department."
"And where's the Antiquities Department?"
"That's closed today. Just the assistant is on."
"Where's the department?"
"Don't bother, mister. They won't let you in. They never let anybody in who just walks up anymore. Just special people. Don't bother."
"I want to bother," Remo said.
The assistant was in a small box of an office with a desk that made moving around difficult. She looked up from a document, focusing above blue-framed eyeglasses. Her reddish hair formed a bouquet around her delicate face.
"He's not in and I'm busy," she said.
"I want to see that stone in the locked room."
"That's what I said. He's not in and I'm busy."
"I don't know who you're talking about," Remo said, "but I just want to see that stone."
"Everybody who sees it goes through the director, James Willingham. And he's not in as I said."
"I'm not going through James Willingham, I'm going through you."
"He'll be back tomorrow."
"I want to see it today."
"It's really nothing much. It hasn't even been classified into a culture yet."
Remo leaned across the desk and, holding her eyes with his, smiled ever so slightly. She blushed.
"C'mon," he whispered in a voice that stroked her.
"All right," she said, "but only because you're sexy. Academically this makes no sense."
Her name was Valerie Garner. She had an M.A. from Ohio State and was working toward her Ph.D at Columbia. She had everything in her life but a real man. She explained this on the way down to the South American exhibit area. There were no real men left in New York City, she said.
"All I want," she said plaintively, "is someone who is strong but gentle, sensitive to my needs, who will be there when I want and not be there when I don't want. Do you see? Is that asking too much?" asked Valerie.
"Yes," said Remo, beginning to suspect that Valerie Garner, assuming she ever met a man, would not be able to see him because the sound waves rising incessantly from her mouth would obscure her vision.
Valerie motioned the guards away from the door and unlocked it with a key from around her neck.
"The director goes bananas about this stone and there's no reason for it. It's nothing. Nothing."
The nothing she described was about Remo's height. It rested on a polished pink marble pedestal with soft crystal lights bathing it in a deep artificial glow like a far-off morning. A small flowing fountain, carved from what appeared to be a solid five-foot piece of jade, bubbled gently, its clear water coming from carved lips above a perfectly round basin.
The stone itself looked like a random block of igneous rock with incredibly inept scratching of circles and lines, and only by the greatest tolerance could Remo make out a circle, birds, snakes, and what might have been a human head with feathers above it. But the rock had what Remo wanted.
A graceful, glowing green signature of "Joey 172" ran diagonally across the circle from the chunky snake to the stiff bird.
"The graffiti is the only piece of art in it," said Valerie.
"I think so, too," said Remo, who had seen enough. The stone looked like the symbol in the note the police had recovered from under Mrs. Delpheen's body, the symbol that was called an Uctut in the other eleven languages of the note.
"You should have seen Willingham when he saw the graffiti on it," Valerie was babbling. "He couldn't talk for an hour. Then he went into his office and stayed on the phone for a half-day. A full half-day. Long distance calls, overseas and everything. More than a thousand dollars in phone calls that one afternoon."
"How do you know?" asked Remo.
"I handle the budget. I thought we were going to get killed by the trustees but they approved it. Even approved two guards for the doors. And look at the stone. It's nothing."
"Why do you say that?" Remo asked.
"For one thing, I don't think it's more than a thousand years old, which would therefore not justify such shoddy craftsmanship. For a second, look at the Aztec and Inca work outside. Now those are gorgeous. This looks like a scribble compared to them. But you want to know something crazy?"
"Of course," said Remo, sidestepping Valerie's hand, which somehow alighted on his fly as she said the word "crazy."
"This stone has had more groups of visitors from all over the world than any other special exhibit. There's no reason for it."
"I think there is," Remo said. "Why didn't you people clean off the graffiti?"
"I tried to suggest that but Willingham wouldn't hear of it."
"Can you reach him today?"
"He never comes in on his day off. He's got an estate up in Westchester. You can't pry him out with crowbars."
"Tell him someone is defacing the statue."
"I can't do that. I'd be fired."
With two fingers, half curled and pressed together like a single instrument, Remo snapped his nails downward across the raised circle, carved by stone implements in a time that preceded even the memory of the Actatl tribe. Crumpled chunks of pinkish rock sprayed from the path of his fingers. A small white scar the size of an electric cord cut a curve in the circle.
"Now you've done it," said Valerie, pressing her hand to her forehead. "Now you've done it. This place is going to be a madhouse."
"You're going to phone Willingham, right?" said Remo pleasantly.
"Right. Get out of here. You don't know what you've done."
"I think I do," Remo said.
"Look," Valerie said, pointing to the scar. "That's bad enough. But if you're still here, there may be murder."
Remo shrugged. "Phone," he said.
"Get out of here."
"No," said Remo.
"You're too cute to die."
"I'm not leaving."
Since he was thin and Valerie was one of the toughest defensive guards in field hockey at Wellesley, she put her shoulder into his back and pushed. The back didn't move. She knew he couldn't weigh more than 150 pounds, so she tried again, this time getting a running start and throwing her body at the back.
When she was bracing for the thump of impact, it seemed as if the back suddenly dropped beneath her and she was hurtling horizontally toward a wall, and just as suddenly there were hands about her waist, soft hands that seemed to caress her as they guided her softly to her feet again.
"Make love, not war," said Valerie.
"Phone Willingham."
"Do that thing with the hands again."
"Later," Remo said.
"Just a touch."
"Later, I'll give you everything you want."
"There's no man who has that much."
Remo winked. Valerie glanced down at his fly.
"You're not one of those machismo types who's great with his fists and duds out in bed, are you?"
"Get Willingham and then find out."
"There won't be anything left of you. I mean it," said Valerie and with a shrug she went to the wall with a green metal cabinet. The cabinet housed a phone.
"It's not bad enough this rock's had to have running water in the room, but it's got its own private line, too. You ought to see the phone bills that come off of this line. It's incredible. Visitors come and make these free calls at museum expense and Willingham doesn't do anything about it."
Valerie's conversation with Willingham quickly dissolved into her pleas for Mr. Willingham to stop screaming. Waiting for him to arrive, Valerie took eighteen drinks of water, fourteen cigarettes, often lighting three at a time, went to the lavatory twice, and muttered "Oh God, what have we done?" every seven minutes.