“Thank you, Starling,” he said.
CHAPTER 40
“Officer Starling, Dr. Pilcher said he’d meet you in the Insect Zoo. I’ll take you over there,” the guard said.
To reach the Insect Zoo from the Constitution Avenue side of the museum, you must take the elevator one level above the great stuffed elephant and cross a vast floor devoted to the study of man.
Tiers of skulls were first, rising and spreading, representing the explosion of human population since the time of Christ.
Starling and the guard moved in a dim landscape peopled with figures illustrating human origin and variation. Here were displays of ritual—tattoos, bound feet, tooth modification, Peruvian surgery, mummification.
“Did you ever see Wilhelm von Ellenbogen?” the guard asked, shining his light into a case.
“I don’t believe I have,” Starling said without slowing her pace.
“You should come sometime when the lights are up and take a look at him. Buried him in Philadelphia in the eighteenth century? Turned right to soap when the ground water hit him.”
The Insect Zoo is a large room, dim now and loud with chirps and whirs. Cages and cases of live insects fill it. Children particularly like the zoo and troop through it all day. At night, left to themselves, the insects are busy. A few of the cases were lit with red, and the fire exit signs burned fiercely red in the dim room.
“Dr. Pilcher?” the guard called from the door.
“Here,” Pilcher said, holding a penlight up as a beacon.
“Will you bring this lady out?”
“Yes, thank you, Officer.”
Starling took her own small flashlight out of her purse and found the switch already on, the batteries dead. The flash of anger she felt reminded her that she was tired and she had to bear down.
“Hello, Officer Starling.”
“Dr. Pilcher.”
“How about ‘Professor Pilcher’?”
“Are you a professor?”
“No, but I’m not a doctor either. What I am is glad to see you. Want to look at some bugs?”
“Sure. Where’s Dr. Roden?”
“He made most of the progress over the last two nights with chaetaxy and finally he had to crash. Did you see the bug before we started on it?”
“No.”
“It was just mush, really.”
“But you got it, you figured it out.”
“Yep. Just now.” He stopped at a mesh cage. “First let me show you a moth like the one you brought in Monday. This is not exactly the same as yours, but the same family, an owlet.” The beam of his flashlight found the large sheeny blue moth sitting on a small branch, its wings folded. Pilcher blew air at it and instantly the fierce face of an owl appeared as the moth flared the undersides of its wings at them, the eye-spots on the wings glaring like the last sight a rat ever sees. “This one’s Caligo beltrao—fairly common. But with this Klaus specimen, you’re talking some heavy moths. Come on.”
At the end of the room was a case set back in a niche with a rail in front of it. The case was beyond the reach of children and it was covered with a cloth. A small humidifier hummed beside it.
“We keep it behind glass to protect people’s fingers—it can fight. It likes the damp too, and glass keeps the humidity in.” Pilcher lifted the cage carefully by its handles and moved it to the front of the niche. He lifted off the cover and turned on a small light above the cage.
“This is the Death’s-head Moth,” he said. “That’s nightshade she’s sitting on—we’re hoping she’ll lay.”
The moth was wonderful and terrible to see, its large brown-black wings tented like a cloak, and on its wide furry back, the signature device that has struck fear in men for as long as men have come upon it suddenly in their happy gardens. The domed skull, a skull that is both skull and face, watching from its dark eyes, the cheekbones, the zygomatic arch traced exquisitely beside the eyes.