“Can’t say the same for yours if you bump me into making a mistake,” Braun muttered. He barely spared Joe a glance. “You’ll pardon me for not shaking your hand.”
“I see you’re occupied. Can you tell me what you’re doing?”
A long-suffering sigh blustered from the slight man. “Performing surgery on a shroud that happens to be more than three thousand years old, a rare example from the eighteenth dynasty.” Columns of hieroglyphs covered the linen.
Mr. Henry explained that it had been sitting in inventory for fifty years and had never been unfolded. “Dr. Westlake wants to see if it would be worth showing in her exhibition. Peter is stitching the fragile textile with silk thread, right along the fold there, so that when we open it, it won’t break apart.”
“You’re blocking the light,” Braun said.
Irritation snapped in Joe’s chest at the man’s tone. Even so, he stepped aside.
Braun grunted. “By the way, if Henry hasn’t told you yet, you won’t find any fakes here.”
“Ease up, Peter,” Mr. Henry said. “He’s on our side.”
“Well, inthatcase.” Sarcasm dripped from the man’s words.
Joe chafed at the unprovoked hostility. “I’m aware I’m interruptingyou, but if I could have a few minutes of your time, I’d greatly appreciate it.”
When the conservator didn’t respond, Mr. Henry cleared his throat. “That shroud has waited fifty years and thousands more besides. It can wait another ten minutes.”
Still nothing.
“It’s up to you,” Joe said, voice even. “We can talk here, or I can bring you down to the station.”
With cold precision, Mr. Braun set his needle on a metal tray, swiped off his glasses, and pinched the bridge of his nose. “What.”
Pulling a stool closer, Joe nodded to Mr. Henry, who left the two alone. He sat, propping one foot on the bottom rung. “Mr. Henry said you’re the lead conservator. How many others work with you?”
“Forme,” he corrected Joe.
Interesting. The hierarchy was obviously important to him. It only took a few questions about his conservation team to realize he considered them his underlings. To conclude that Braun was confident in his skills would be a vast understatement.
Behind the conservator, two young men bent over a slab of stone. Wearing gloves, they dipped cotton swab–tipped wands into some kind of solution and carefully went over the stone.
Mr. Braun sighed. “I trust them to clean without my direct supervision, but not much else.”
“Then why hire them if they’re so incompetent?”
“Do you have any idea how hard it is to find qualified conservators who specialize in Egyptian antiquities? Next to impossible. We have to train them ourselves.”
“Did you learn on the job here, too?”
A laugh puffed through his nose while he wiped his lenses with a handkerchief. “No, I came with my résumé in perfect order, ready for responsibility. Before the war, we had more help. Bright, promising young men. But they enlisted and came back with tremors in their hands. Their careers were over. I’ve been trying to train up a new team ever since.”
“That sounds challenging,” Joe conceded.
“You have no idea.” Braun replaced his glasses on his nose and peered at him again. “You’ve been working with Dr. Westlake, have you? I guarantee that when the upcoming exhibit opens, she, Lythgoe, and Winlock will be the ones who get all the credit. The public will be looking at my handiwork but will have no idea the time and skill it takes for the artifacts to be deemed worthy of display.”
“Will your name be in the catalog?”
He crossed thin arms over an apron-covered oxford shirt. “I doubt it. The director wants to keep this work quiet, even though all of it is standard. Coward.”
Joe scratched the word into his notebook. “What is he afraid of?”
“Scandal. Or even the slightest whiff of it. Don’t tell me you don’t know about Cesnola.”
Joe racked his brain, mentally searching through all he’d read as background for this case. “The first director of the Met,” he supplied at last. “Luigi Palma di Cesnola, the Italian American war hero who donated his own artifacts to the museum in its early years.”
