Jennie by Douglas Preston Read Free Book Online Page A

not at all what I expected.”
    â€œI don’t think there will be any winning over the wife,” I said, watching her follow him into the house with a firm shutting of the door.

three
    [F ROM taped interviews with Dr. Harold Epstein, Curator Emeritus, Department of Anthropology, Boston Museum of Natural History, in his office at the museum in July 1991, November 1992, and January 1993.]
    Do you know the expression “Words pay no debts?” There is, you see, nothing I can tell you that will change anything. Or pay any debts. We’re here because almost everything that was written about this thing was a pack of lies. You’re finally going to tell the truth.
    The “Jennie period,” as I like to call it, took place between 1965 and 1974. I was head of the department. Hugo was about twenty years my junior and was the Curator of Physical Anthropology. Hugo assumed the chairmanship when I retired in 1974. Until this Jennie business, he was one of the most capable and creative scientists the museum had the privilege to employ.
    The museum? It hasn’t changed its appearance in one hundred and forty years. It’s like Churchill said, it was ugly yesterday, it’s ugly today, and it’ll wake up just as ugly tomorrow morning. I always thought it looked like a grim Crusader castle. When it rains, those rooftop gargoyles spout water. At dusk, bats drop down fromthe eaves and swoop about. They scare the secretaries. The museum park used to be surrounded by a great wrought-iron fence with spikes. They took it down when someone jumped off the roof and landed on it. They had to cut out a piece of fence, you see. The spikes had gone clear through the fellow’s gut. It was one of those A.B.D.s finally giving up. A.B.D.? It means “All But Dissertation.” The museum is full of them, graduate students who are incapable of finishing their dissertations. They stay on for years, living off grants, examining specimens, gathering data, wandering about the halls.
    That statue out front is Thierry de Louliz, venerable founder of the museum. It is always covered with pigeon lime: pigeons love to defecate on his head. It is a perfectly absurd statue, the old man holding that fossil fish like Napoleon with his sword. He was much feared and hated during his lifetime, but I think he looks like a dotty old uncle, cutting a ridiculous figure among the sycamores. I have not, thank goodness, accomplished enough in my life to be awarded a postmortem statue. Louliz’s great accomplishment was to dogmatically oppose Darwin’s theory of natural selection to the bitter end. I mean, to the bitter end of
Louliz
. His last words were, “Zis Darwin, I tell you, iss a great fool.” [Laughs.]
    The building inside had a most peculiar smell. A combination of damp granite, cheap cleaning fluids, and old buckram. Plus a faint smell of mortification. Dead flesh. There were a lot of dead things in the museum. Some thirty million specimens. Two million in the osteological collection—that’s bones—and another three million alcoholics. Alcoholics, my friend, is what we term animals preserved in jars of fluid. Millions of insects and spiders. Snakes, tortoises, frogs and salamanders, rocks and minerals, meteorites, you name it. Ten thousand human skeletons and several hundred mummies. Not Egyptian mummies, but Indians, Aleuts, Tierra del Fuegans, those sorts of people. The collection represents a history of graverobbing, murder, and mayhem stretching back one hundred and forty years. I am being facetious, of course. Don’t print that.I’m eighty-five years old, and I have gotten into the habit of saying whatever I damn well please.
    To get to the old Anthropology Department, one had to walk through the African Hall, past an archway framed by a brace of elephant tusks, world record size. The elephant was bagged by some bloodthirsty trustee of the museum in the 1920s. Hugo Archibald was a