The Cloisters(72)

It seemed the most pressing question was why no one had ever installed cameras in the library or Patrick’s office. A question that irked Louis, who responded by saying that The Cloisters was a community of trust, and Patrick had been adamantly opposed to the surveillance of scholars; it was not our mission. This irritation had trickled down through the entire security team, who were upset to see the standard of their work being questioned by the police.

Rachel and I were busy outlining the parameters of the article we were planning on publishing about the cards, but we had also been asked by Michelle, in anticipation of a new curator and assistant curator joining us, to pull together an onboarding document outlining the status of upcoming exhibitions, collection highlights, artworks that were due to be put on display in the galleries in the fall. It was tedious work, requiring accession numbers and the inclusion of preexisting correspondence between Patrick and the Cluny Museum in Paris or the National Gallery in London.

“The search function is down,” said Rachel, pushing back her chair and sighing.

We were in the process of pulling accession numbers for works that were scheduled to go on loan all around the world in the coming year. Usually this was work done by the Registrar, but Curatorial wasn’t the only department to find itself short-staffed that summer.

“Let’s just take the list and pull them manually.” She looked at me expectantly, already standing, a pencil in one hand, a piece of paper in the other.

We walked through the galleries, noting numbers until we hit the smaller works on the list that were kept in storage. Our key cards buzzed us past the conservation rooms and into Storage, where rows and rows of shelves were kept in the climate-controlled dark. Rachel flicked on the lights and the fluorescents struggled to life.

The number of objects gifted to the Metropolitan on an annual basis was staggering. And those were only the objects they accepted. In its earliest years, the museum had become something of a repository for all paintings, sculptures, and objets d’art that didn’t survive the transition from one generation to the next. Every now and then, the museum would quietly sell pieces that never managed to find their way into a gallery to make room for new things that might.

Storage, then, was like a heavily curated and conserved dustbin. In The Cloisters’ storage, there were countless examples of carved capitals and pottery fragments. There were closed manuscripts in amber plastic boxes with elaborately jeweled bindings, miniatures, enamel devotionals, pieces of jewelry, reliquaries, gold-plated icons, and a single fossilized toe of a saint. We paused to take down the accession number for a reliquary of Saint Christopher.

I pulled out a shelf and looked at the exquisitely turned miniature ivory boars and unicorns while Rachel wrote down numbers on the sheet of paper. There were also, I noticed, a few slots where works were missing.

“Where did all of these go?” I asked, pointing at the empty slots.

“Probably on display,” said Rachel, looking over my shoulder. “Or on loan.”

I traced my finger along the labels that marked the missing objects. Each accession number began with the first three letters of the work’s title, and I tried to imagine what might have been here, RIN for ring perhaps, a TOU perhaps indicating Toulouse. But the next label caught my eye. The first three letters of its accession read DAR. Only then did I look at its title, Saint Daria. The details read: ivory, German, 1170, Weston Endowment Gift 1953. I wrote down the accession number and followed Rachel, who had moved on to manuscripts.

The time we spent in storage seemed to drag on, and although I tried to stay focused on what Rachel was saying—Did you see Otto III’s Bible anywhere?—all I could do was replay the way the carving in Leo’s apartment had felt in my hand, the way it was both heavy and slight, the way it had been expertly incised. I had looked up the story of Saint Daria when I got home that night. She was an obscure early Christian saint who had begun her life as a priestess for the goddess Minerva. But as an apostate to the Roman religion, she had likely been given the fate awarded to unfaithful priestesses—entombment, alive, in the sand pits near the Roman catacombs. The image of myself, trapped in one of the rooms of the museum—no door, no windows, no exit—came to me.

“Are you ready?” Rachel asked, facing me and closing a storage drawer. “I think I have everything.”

I nodded.

“Are you okay, Ann?”

“Fine,” I said. “Just… a weird feeling.”

“I hate that,” she said, holding the door open for me to pass through.

Back in the library I waited impatiently for the search function on our intranet to be restored. When it was, I entered the accessions number and clicked return.

Of course, I had known what I would find, but that didn’t change the fact that in front of me, on the screen, was the figurine I had found in Leo’s closet. It had to be worth—I tried in vain to calculate the cost of something that priceless and historic—at least $50,000. True, it wasn’t much by The Cloisters’ standards, but it certainly would be to a gardener, an aspiring playwright.

I closed my laptop and got up, not meeting Rachel’s questioning gaze. I needed some air.

Outside, the grasses of the Cuxa Cloister swayed in the breeze that made its way off the Hudson, the heads of daisies weaving and bobbing merrily as I found myself, resigned, walking toward the security offices.