twenty-eight:
what happens in oceania
“OKAY,” I said into my walkie. “My turn. The rest of you, stay here and try to look grotesque.”
It wasn’t an insult or even a joke, really. We were in the sculpture garden behind the E. A. Stanford museum and, as everyone who’s ever been there knows, the place is full of really, really bizarre statues.
I found my first handhold and started up the wall. There was lots of ivy, mostly shriveled and leafless this time of the year, and I’ve learned from hard experience not to trust the stuff except in an emergency—you know, like when you’ve had to leap out a window unexpectedly. Instead I was going the slow, steady way, and the brick facade was a big help.
The museum is in the former Stanford family residence, deep inside the campus walls, and is what the British like to refer to fondly as a “pile.” The Brits should know, because the original version was still in England somewhere, named after some duke. You could look it up. Anyway, like the manor house it had been copied from, the museum was a monstrous assembly of reddish brick, with crenellated towers and the whole bit. The part we needed to get into was the new wing, which would have been the stables or something in the original, but here was a long two-story building with a glass roof. However, because the new wing had been built less than twenty years ago, it was going to be easier to make rooftop entry from the old building. That was why I was climbing up those bricks, carefully picking out toe-holds and finger-holds, almost exactly like someone who knew what he was doing.
I had a difficult moment when a rain gutter started wobbling under my feet, but I managed to get my belly up over the edge before anything noisy happened, then I just lay for a moment, breathing. I pulled the rope ladder out of my backpack, anchored it, and let it unroll with what I hoped wasn’t too loud a clatter down to my team waiting below. I didn’t wait for them. Once my legs stopped trembling, I inched along the top of the wing very carefully, because I was crawling over glass panes, until I reached the roof of the main building. Then I got up and moved (okay, scurried) from chimney pot to chimney pot ’til I reached the service door. The door was modern, and had a massive dead bolt, which would have been hard to get through without sounding like someone was holding military exercises on the roof, but it also had a card reader.
“Duster, this is Cash,” I said quietly into my com. “I’m here at Door One. Do you have a handle on the alarm system?”
“Yes. The guard’s just left Oceania, headed downstairs. Do you have the card?” Wendell was sitting in Clarence’s awful Plymouth out in the parking lot adjacent to the main campus auditorium, a couple of hundred yards away from us through the trees. A controversial East Coast academic was giving a talk tonight; lots of people were on campus and in the parking lots, which made better cover. The Stanford campus police don’t like people hanging around for no good reason.
I pulled the smart card out of my pocket. “I’m using it now.”
We were lucky that museums, even nice ones, don’t have quite the same attention to security detail as, say, financial institutions or government labs. Not that the Stanford Museum of the Arts was particularly vulnerable, just that it was a lot easier to steal data from museum employees than NASA scientists. Thus, the card, which had been duped using a real museum curator’s information. Not only would it open any door locks that used cards, it would leave a false and somewhat confusing trail, because the real curator was on duty tonight, helping to set up a big new exhibit in the North American Hall in the main building, not too far below where I stood now. I slid the card. The light went on, the door popped open. “Perfect,” I said. “I’m in.”
I had to admit that if I’d had any doubts about Wendell’s credentials and background, they were gone. He did good, quality work. I still didn’t completely trust him, of course—how could I? But I was at the point where I had to take some things on faith, if you’ll excuse that expression when applied to breaking, entering, and pursuing feuds with powerful angels and demons. Wendell, Clarence, and the Amazons were what I had; without Sam, who still hadn’t called me back, I had no choice but to roll the dice and hope for the best.
Oxana and Halyna reached me a few moments later, followed by Clarence. The stairway down was metal and full of echoes, so we took it slow. At the bottom I had to use the card again, but when the door popped open this time, we were in a service corridor at the outer edge of the North American Hall. I’d warned everybody about the workers just a few dozen yards away, so we all hurried through quickly, then continued through two more security doors (one of which I had to open the old-fashioned way, with lock-picking tools, sweaty fingers, and silent curses) until we were through and alone on the top floor of the Asia wing. We needed to make it through the “Oceania and the Pacific” collection to reach the stairs.
Yes, the place was borderline creepy. If you can think of any people in San Judas less likely to worry about haunted museums than me, I’d love to meet them—I mean, come on, some of my best friends are ghosts, and I’ve been to Hell. Still, even I have to admit that sneaking through pools of shadow and dim moonlight, between frowning ceremonial masks from Melanesia and life-size New Guinea ancestor fetishes with hair and teeth taken from dead people is in fact a bit unsettling. Kind of like I suspect things are at night in the It’s A Small World ride, when all the little figures come to life and whisper about how they’d like to torture and murder all those screaming children and grinning grown-ups in the boats.
The collection here on the top floor also reminded me uncomfortably of Islanders Hall downtown, where I had spent an interesting night of sudden violence, blood, and lots of screaming not too long before. I hoped that wasn’t an omen.
A lot of the creepiest pieces in the museum, by the way, were collected by Elizabeth Atell Stanford herself, which gives you an idea of what she liked.
Don’t get me wrong. I’ve got nothing against Pacific Island culture, but when every time you turn around, you get a faceful of bulging, angry eyes and grinning dead-guy teeth, there’s a strong tendency to believe that what happens in Oceania should stay in Oceania.
I checked my watch. If everything was on schedule, we had a good ten minutes before the guard finished his rounds of the floor below us. We wanted to get in as soon as he left, because that was the part of the museum we really wanted to explore, so we hunkered down near the stairwell and waited until Wendell, watching it all with the museum’s own security cameras, sent me the all-clear. Clarence’s man-friend had picked out some really nice communications gear, stuff Orban had accepted from a drug dealer who couldn’t pay his armored car bill because of a slight downturn in the crack market. Halyna and Oxana both wore tanks on their backs, Halyna’s part of an old Russian flamethrower, Oxana’s an industrial sprayer full of pressurized silver nitrate solution. The women were also sporting infrared goggles, which Clarence and I didn’t need because we had angel vision; we can do a pretty good job at night without artificial help. Looking at the stuff we were all carrying—silenced assault weapons, coils of rope, grappling hooks, pry bars—you’d have thought we were carrying out a raid on an Al Qaeda stronghold in the Spin Ghar mountains instead of crouching next to a mannequin that was rocking a gorgeous cloak of bird of paradise feathers. (The cape actually looked really nice. I felt sorry it was so dark that I couldn’t see the colors properly, even with angel eyes.)
When Wendell finally told us to move, we made our way quietly down the stairs, then waited at the bottom for his signal. The museum is laid out more or less on a geographic model, so we had to work our way across Japan, China, Korea and Southeast Asia before we reached the West Asian section where Edie had received those powerful impressions. Was the horn’s hiding place something small, like a bootlegger’s stash? Or, if it was something bigger, had the museum’s bosses known about it from the start? It seemed like it would take quite a juggling act to steal enough space to add something that significant without everyone knowing, but who knew how far the archangelic power to cloud men’s minds could get you?