Smithback eased open the grimy door and peered inside. This, he thought, had to be one of the more macabre places in the Museum: the storage area of the Physical Anthropology Laboratory, or, in Museum parlance, the Skeleton Room. The Museum had one of the largest collections of skeletons in the country, second only to the Smithsonian—twelve thousand in this room alone. Most were North and South American Indian or African, collected in the nineteenth century, during the heyday of physical anthropology. Tiers of large metal drawers rose in ordered ranks to the ceiling; each drawer contained at least a portion of a human skeleton. Yellowed labels were slotted into the front of each drawer; on these labels were numbers, names of tribes, sometimes a short history. Other, briefer labels carried the chill of anonymity.
Smithback had once spent an afternoon wandering among the boxes, opening them and reading the notes, [163] almost all of which were written in faded, elegant scripts. He had jotted several down in his notebook:
Spec. No. 1880-1770
Walks in Cloud. Yankton Sioux. Killed in Battle of Medicine Bow Creek, 1880.
Spec. No. 1899-1206
Maggie Lost Horse. Northern Cheyenne.
Spec. No. 1933-43469
Anasazi. Canyon del Muerto. Thorpe-Carlson expedition, 1900.
Spec. No. 1912-695
Luo. Lake Victoria. Gift of Maj. Gen. Henry Throckmorton, Bart.
Spec. No. 1872-10
Aleut, provenance unknown.
It was a strange graveyard indeed.
Beyond the storage area lay the warren of rooms housing the Physical Anthropology Lab. In earlier days, physical anthropologists had spent most of their time in this laboratory measuring bones and trying to determine the relationship between the races, where humanity had originated, and similar studies. Now, much more complex biochemical and epidemiological research was being done in the Physical Anthro Lab.
Several years earlier, the Museum—at Frock’s insistence—had decided to merge its genetics research and DNA laboratories with the lab. Beyond the dusty bone-storage area lay a spotless assortment of huge centrifuges, hissing autoclaves, electrophoresis apparatus, glowing monitors, elaborate blown-glass distillation columns, and titration setups—one of the most advanced technical facilities of its kind. It was in the [164] no-man’s-land between the old and the new that Greg Kawakita had set up shop.
Smithback looked through the tall racks of the storage room toward the lab doors. It was just after ten, and Kawakita was the only one around. Through the open shelves, Smithback could see Kawakita standing one or two rows over, making sharp, jerky overhead movements with his left hand, waving something about. Then, Smithback heard the zing of a line and the whirring of a fly reel.
“Catch anything?” he called out loudly.
He heard a sharp exclamation and a clatter of a dropped rod.
“Damn you, Smithback,” Kawakita said. “You’re always sneaking about. This isn’t a good time to go around scaring people, you know. I might have been packing a .45 or something.”
He walked down his aisle and came around the corner, reeling in his fly rod and scowling good-humoredly at Smithback.
Smithback laughed. “I told you not to work down here with all these skeletons. Now look what’s happened: you’ve gone off the deep end at last.”
“Just practicing,” Kawakita laughed. “Watch. Third shelf. Buffalo Hump.”
He flicked the rod. The line whirred out, and the fly struck, then rebounded off a drawer on the third tier of a shelf at the end of the aisle. Smithback walked over. Sure enough: it contained the bones of someone who had once been Buffalo Hump.
Smithback whistled.
Kawakita drew in some line, loosely holding the loops in his left hand while he gripped the cork butt of the rod in his right. “Fifth shelf, second row. John Mboya,” he said.
Again the line arced through the air between the narrow shelves and the tiny fly ticked the correct label.
[165] “Izaak Walton, move over,” said Smithback, shaking his head.
Kawakita reeled in the line and started dismantling the bamboo rod. “It’s not quite like fishing on a river,” he said as he worked, “but it’s great practice, especially in this confined space. Helps me relax during breaks. When I don’t tangle my line in one of the cases, that is.”
When Kawakita was first hired by the Museum, he had declined the sunny fifth-floor office offered him, and instead claimed a much smaller one in the lab, saying he wanted to be closer to the action. Since then, he had already published more papers than some full curators had in their entire careers. His cross-disciplinary studies under Frock had quickly led him to an Assistant Curatorship in evolutionary biology, where he had initially devoted his time to the study of plant evolution. Kawakita skillfully used his mentor’s notoriety to advance himself. Lately, he had put aside plant evolution temporarily for the Genetic Sequence Extrapolator program. His only other passion in life, aside from his work, seemed to be fly-fishing; in particular, as he would explain to anyone who listened, his search for the noble and elusive Atlantic salmon.
