The Love Potion Murders in the Museum of Man Read online

  I think being dressed in a tuxedo and sipping neat Scotch definitely helped as I inserted the tape and pressed the button and rewound it just a bit, a final delaying action. I saw again the figure in an elaborate headdress dancing to the pounding log drum and then appearing in front of Corny, who has had his clothes cut away. I hear Corny say, “Ferdie, keep the camera on the shaman in the cockade of red macaw feathers. Oh, God, I think he’s doing the cleansing dance right now.”

  Then we see the man in the brilliant headdress and painted near-naked torso dancing around and bending over an object on the ground. Corny comes into view again and a harsh, familiar sound is heard off camera. Corny gasps. “Oh, God. That’s a chain saw. Bricklesby said nothing about that. It’s not in the tradition. Oh, God. Or am I hallucinating?”

  I held my breath and resisted the impulse to hit the STOP button as the shaman appears with the old chain saw. It sputters and spews smoke. And I forced myself to watch as in one horrific motion, the saw is brought up under Corny’s outstretched left arm. Corny screams as the whirring blade slices off the arm through the biceps, spewing blood and bits of bone. I turn away.

  Incredibly, it is Corny I hear next. “Follow the arm, Ferdie,” he says, his voice weak and choking. “Get a close-up on the ceremony. I think … I think it’s going to the ceremonial grill.”

  As I watched, amazed and horrified, the camera closes to where the severed arm is being sanctified before being placed over the sacred fire. Corny is heard again. “Ferdie. Keep the camera on the ceremony. They’re going to keep … chopping me up. Get as much as … you can. Especially when they come for my heart. Try to … get it down … especially the cutting ceremony …”

  The camera swings back to Corny. One native has successfully tied a tourniquet of leather thong around the stump of Corny’s severed arm, while another paints the bloody stump with a thick dark paste from a gourd.

  Corny keeps talking, more breathless than ever. “I’m not really in any great pain. I know they are taking me in parts. They want to keep me alive as long as possible. It’s only death. I’m … I’m … like the center of the universe now. Their universe. This is a true honor. Groundbreaking. I smell my own flesh cooking. I know I couldn’t eat any. Not that auto-anthropophagy is unknown.”

  Ferdie pans back with the camera. The shaman is dancing around again with the chain saw. It’s turned off. As though part of the ritual, he pulls the cord. It doesn’t work. He pulls again, and the infernal thing roars to life with a great belch of smoke. The camera swings back to focus on Corny again. He’s breathing in gasps. “God, I hurt. And this is just the beginning. But this has got to be the first for an anthropologist. Norman, don’t let Joss see this. Promise me. Here comes the shaman for more of me.” Corny screams again as the shaman, not as neatly this time, saws off his right leg halfway up the thigh with another spewing of blood, bone, and flesh.

  I have to cover my eyes. I knock back the Scotch. The drumming reaches a fever pitch. There are whoops. Incredibly, Corny speaks again. “I’m still okay. Ferdie get the, get the …” Like his arm, the stump of his leg is tied off again and anointed with the dark paste. “Bricklesby will have to be revised. They don’t start with the genitals and the … How … how could they, and keep the sacrifice alive? My God. This is a amazing.”

  Mercifully, right then, Corny passes out. He sags in the crude stanchion, horrific and yes, strangely glorious, stirring within me some atavistic recognition of what we are. A few minutes later he manages to open his eyes and say, quite clearly, “Norman, no copyright.” And while the shaman is dancing around the chain saw and trying to start it, the tape goes blank.

  I ran it for a while longer, but there was no more on it. I couldn’t have gone on watching it anyway. I was in shock. I felt half crazed. Is this the heart of darkness? Who is worse, those savages or Corny himself, making himself complicit in their debauchery? What are we?

  I have no real idea what to do with this truly incredible piece of documentation. I suppose I should make a copy and then clear its legal status through our attorney. I mean, while the MOM did not contribute very much to underwriting the trip, is it possible that Jocelyn and their children will be able to sue the museum for wrongful death or some such thing. Strange how, in our lawyer-infested society, the first thing you need think about in a situation like this is liability.

  On the other hand it is a kind of evidence of a heroic if unwise exploration of the heart of our species. Perhaps I will consult the Reverend Alfie Lopes. The matter involved here is moral as well as legal. I would not want this footage to fall into the wrong hands. There are parties that would exploit it for its sensationalism. There are enemies of the museum who would use it as a pretext to attack us. At the same time, it is a remarkable piece of anthropological fieldwork. And our allegiance must be to the high purposes to which the founders dedicated it: to explore the phenomenon of man in its many manifestations.

  In a kind of daze I rewound the tape and made my way over to Margaret Mead Auditorium. I thought of stopping the introductory proceedings at some point to announce what I had just witnessed. But of course, that would have been utterly inappropriate.

  On the other hand, I could not help having the tape color my appreciation of Father O’Gould’s address. In his lecture, “Why Is There No Tuna-Safe Dolphin,” the good priest gave us a taste of his upcoming book, Paragon of Animals, taking a bead on a question he has been grappling with all his professional life.

  Everyone knows, of course, that S.J., as we all call him, holds the recently created Teilhard de Chardin Chair in Evolution and Cosmology. In his lecture S.J. went right into the teeth of prevailing notions, contending that there is indeed a scala naturae, and that mankind is at the very top of it. He said that to claim that there are no normative standards that can be used to rank species is arrant nonsense. The very professors making these claims, and he named a few who are vociferous on the subject, “are themselves part of a well-defined hierarchy, one that carefully grades people, especially fellow academics seeking to join their departments. They rank very precisely who is or is not good enough to be a colleague. Yet they maintain that Homo sapiens as a whole is no better or worse than any other living species. No better than, say, a turnip. Sure now, would Professor Dawkins of Oxford, for instance, consider a turnip worthy of a professorship? On the contrary, most of these thinkers would think nothing of uprooting a perfectly innocent turnip, skinning it alive, boiling it, mashing it with salt, pepper, and perhaps a little butter, and then eating it. Would they consider doing the same thing to a colleague? I doubt it very much. Yet they claim that we are no better or worse than a turnip.”

  Needless to say, Father O’Gould’s talk at that point had provoked more than a few laughs. But I kept wondering what he would think were I to show him the tape I had just watched. Are we the paragon of animals? Or just animals?

  He shortly turned serious, and a hush fell over the standing-room-only audience — many of them students, I was pleased to note. Father O’Gould declared that unless we recognize and accept our position at what he called “the transcendent apex of the chain of being,” i.e., our superiority relative to other species, then we undercut what little moral authority we have left “in an age when the God of our fathers has retreated into myth and history … To say that we are no better than bacteria or turnips or rabbits is to give ourselves license, like them, to submit blindly to natural processes, to overrun the planet, to indulge in mass exterminations, indeed, to act any way we want to.”

  The good priest went on to point out that the denial of any rank in creation was pushing the rationality of the laboratory to absurd lengths. “Is it not a philistine notion that truth is only to be found in a test tube or under a microscope? Simply because the position of mankind at the top of creation is not a verifiable hypothesis does not render it invalid. Because neither can you prove that Mendelssohn’s Octet in E is beautiful. Those who declare that all species are equal are assuming a stance
that, in its apparent disinterested objectivity, is fraught with more pernicious hubris than to simply admit that we are, as human beings, on top, and with all that means in terms of responsibility.

  “I do not mean superior in any aesthetic sense. At least as depicted by Freud — Lucien, that is, not Sigmund — we suffer in comparison with the beauty of the hyacinth macaw or to that of Panthera tigris altaica. We certainly are not morally superior, though there is the potential for that. But we are clearly superior in intellect and technology, and that translates into power. With that power comes an awesome responsibility.

  “Indeed, it is this position at the top of creation that ought to provoke in each of us the moral anxiety to proceed with scrupulous care in our stewardship. Make no mistake about it. We are the wardens and we must attend our duties in a manner befitting superior beings. Otherwise, we will answer to history as surely as the despots and dictators that have gone before us.”

  Father O’Gould concluded that real humility was nothing less than the acceptance of reality. “The incumbent responsibility that comes with our place in the universe is the gift of natural selection, the basis on which we must become our own necessary gods.”

  It was, in all, a moving and provocative occasion. Father O’Gould’s inspiring talk, along with some help from the dinner wine, restored a good measure of my faith in humankind. But not entirely. Images of Corny’s cruel demise haunt my inner vision. I recoil, of course. I deplore what happened. Yet something atavistic in me assents to the sacrifice. There is nearly a kind of comfort in it, a comfort I resist. Is human sacrifice, in its myriad forms, an attempt, however grotesque, to give meaning to death?

  21

  The plot is thickening like one of those soups you throw things into without being quite sure how it’s going to turn out. I finally worked up the courage this morning to undertake a most delicate and sad task: I called Jocelyn Chard, Corny’s widow, and told her I needed to come by and see her.

  “You’ve heard from Corny?” she asked, an excited hope in her voice.

  “Yes, but I’d rather … come over.”

  There was one of those silences. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

  “Yes, I’m afraid so, but I’d like to come see you anyway, Jocelyn.”

  After another silence, she said, “Yes, of course. I’ll call the children in the meanwhile.”

  I drove over to their home on Wordsworth Avenue, a tree-shaded neighborhood of commodious but not ostentatious houses known as Professors Row. Jocelyn let me in as she spoke into one of those walkaround phones. “Yes, dear. I’m fine. He’s just arrived. Yes, I’ll call you right back.”

  A nearly tangible aura pervaded the house as Jocelyn led me into the bow-fronted living room. I could feel that dark sense of expectancy that the news of death brings, especially the death of someone close. I think we expect a kind of revelation, when in fact it’s only death, the end. With bright nervous eyes, the Widow Chard bade me take a seat in an armchair adjacent the sofa. I couldn’t help but notice, as I had on happier occasions (though I seldom socialized much with the Chards until Elsbeth came along), that the things on the walls, the masks and the bark-cloth hangings, were of museum quality. And, I wondered in a shameful sort of way, had Corny left any of them to the museum?

  A slight, enthusiastic woman, Jocelyn effects more than a touch of the Bohemian. Her long graying hair braided down her back was of a piece with the necklace of heavy ebony figurines and the layered dark clothing she always wears. She put a hand on my forearm. “Tell me, Norman, tell me what’s happened. We can have coffee later.”

  “Of course, of course,” I expostulated. To think that the routine gestures of hospitality still pertained under the circumstances. I took a deep breath. “He was killed by natives. By members of a tribe whose traditions he went to document.”

  “Oh, dear.” She placed her hand over her mouth. She held on to my forearm again, as though to steady herself. “Did they … did they eat him?”

  “I’m afraid they did.”

  “Oh, my, my.” She held her hand to her mouth again for a moment. Her face twitched. She gave a short, hysterical laugh. “I think it was what he always wanted.” Then, with utter composure, she asked, “How did you find out?”

  “A tape was made.”

  “Of the …”

  “Yes.”

  Her self-possession wavered for a moment. “I don’t want to see it. I don’t want the children to see it. I want it kept private.”

  “Of course. I can see to that. For estate purposes, I will have to show it to whatever authorities need to see it.” I cravenly avoided the word attorney. I could envision some lawyer convincing her to sue the university or even the museum for wrongful death.

  “Was it … gruesome?”

  “By my standards. By anyone’s standards, I would think.”

  “It shows him being killed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was he terrified?”

  “Only partly. I think he was exalted in a way. They had administered a drug to him, a hallucinogen, before they really started.”

  “They stabbed him?”

  “No.”

  “How did they …?”

  “They cut him up.”

  “Alive?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “With …?”

  “A chain saw.”

  “Oh, my poor Corny.” Her attractive gray eyes went awry for a moment, and she held her hands to her breast. “I don’t want anyone else to see it.”

  “I understand.”

  “These things have a way of getting around …”

  “You and I are the only people who know about it other than a young prospector who brought it to me. And the cameraman, of course, as well as members of the tribe. The cameraman is a kind of go-between. He gave the tape to the mining geologist who delivered it to me personally.”

  The widow was nodding, looking around the room, as though it were now strange territory, its trappings those of a man, a husband, who no longer existed.

  “Jocelyn,” I began, “I don’t know what kind of legal consequences there might be in terms of prosecution for murder. I doubt very much that the long arm of American law can reach into such remote parts. I have a feeling that the State Department will say, in a very nice way, of course, that Corny should have known better.”

  “He did know better. He knew it was very dangerous.”

  “We all knew it was risky. It’s one of the reasons, frankly, that I refused to fund any part of the expedition. Except for medical supplies and insurance for medical evacuation.”

  “I know. Corny understood that. He was very appreciative of what you did.”

  I cleared my throat. “But what I would like to know, Jocelyn, is who did fund his trip.”

  She hesitated for a moment and then threw up her hands. “Oh, I don’t suppose it makes any difference now. Corny swore me to secrecy, but he’s dead now, isn’t he. Dead and really gone.” She held onto to my forearm again, the tears welled but didn’t spill. I admired her for that.

  “Who was it, Jocelyn?” I pressed.

  “Oh, someone in that pig society he was always going to.”

  “Pig society?”

  “Le Société de Cochon Long,” she said with a disdainful exaggeration of a French accent.

  “Really?” I exclaimed, just managing to conceal the extent of my surprise and that nearly vaporous sensation, vertebral in its origin, that comes over me when I feel I have somehow uncovered a piece of the larger puzzle. Though in the mundanity of things, I couldn’t see how Corny’s death in a far-off jungle had anything to do with the murders of Ossmann and Woodley. “I didn’t know it still existed,” I said, trying to sound casual.

  “Oh, God, all that publicity around the cannibal killing trial brought in every screwball you could imagine. There’s a lot more of them out there than you might suspect.”

  I nodded. “Who belongs to the society today?”

  “T
he usual people. Raul is very active, as is Alger from down in the Skull Collection. And some newcomers. Corny didn’t talk about it much. It was, after all, supposed to be a secret society.”

  Of course, I thought, determined now to go back to the room with the green baize door and take a much closer look around. I remained awhile longer, going over arrangements I would need to make with the university about an official notice of death and an obituary. I told her I would speak to the dean and to Alfie Lopes about a memorial service if she wanted me to.

  “Thank you, Norman, that would be a great help.” She was visibly rallying, doing what had to be done. “I know Alfie well. I’ll call him myself. I’ll need his comfort. He’s so good at times like this.”

  As I was leaving, she took one of my hands in both of hers, and her face had a contrite expression. “I’m sorry, Norman, but I forgot to ask, but how is Elsbeth?”

  “Not well,” I said, realizing with a wave of empathy that I would be in her shoes before long.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry.” But the Widow Chard was also looking me over, I swear, as a man who would soon be single again.

  I went back to the museum and spent a good deal of time and effort contacting the list of people I thought should know of Corny’s demise while also penning a suitably ambiguous account of how the news arrived, to the effect: “Though a final confirmation has yet to be made, reliable sources report that Professor Chard died at the hands of a remote tribe on which he was conducting ethnographic research.”

  I found on my office phone another recorded communication from Urgent Productions. Mr. Castor’s voice reached out of the little speaker on the phone in a squawk as he apologized a bit too profusely for “losing his cool” during our last conversation. He said he had been under intense pressure from the film’s backers to have “respectful use” of the museum for “the authenticity of the project.” This time I did not find his call a nuisance. On the contrary, it gave me an idea regarding Corny’s fate that I intend to pursue.