It looked like any old, built-out city. Cobblestone streets and sidewalks; hillside stairs ascending through files of weathered stone buildings, mostly Gothic and neoclassical; shade trees and a stingy proportion of lawn cover. Just one giveaway: the buildings were very small, because the dead need less elbow room than the living.

It was a moonless summer night, barely enough wind to stir the greenery over our heads, and Clement and I were following Nye through the Cimetière du Père Lachaise. Nye’s path sequestered us from sight of the cobblestone streets as much as possible. We wore gray coveralls and carried our gear in innocuous canvas bags. The idea was to pass for grounds crew if we bumped into kids on a dare or a homeless person, and a lot would depend on Clement’s powers of persuasion. I knew that Nye could read French pretty well, but he wanted one member of our team to have speaking fluency and my second language was German, former lingua franca of science.

Clement was built like a wrestler and carried two bags, both big and heavy. If life imitated Central Casting, he would be our leader, but the leader was Nye, who looked like he’d had three days to fatten up after being liberated from Belsen. Nye recruited us, made our plans, bought our gear and paid our hefty wages—no profit percentage. He took on one other leadership perk that almost made Clement back out. We went to Nye’s hotel room for muster and saw him strap on a Heckler and Koch with a black V8 can on the muzzle; Nye would see that there were no living witnesses to what we would be doing. I don’t know if Clement stayed in out of greed or because Nye might not want any living ex-hirelings either, ones who knew everything and hadn’t gotten in deep enough to avoid prison time if they went to the police.

We couldn’t move faster than a (no joke intended) pallbearer’s pace without stumbling in the darkness, and there were times when I almost lost sight of Nye’s wispy silhouette. Nye said we’d entered the perimeter at the point nearest our destination, but it seemed like an honest half hour before he stopped and put down his bag. At first I thought Nye was going to admit he’d gotten lost. Then I made out the famous bust, starlit, atop a stone pedestal.

“This is it, guys,” Nye said, at a cautious decibel level.

Clement unzipped one of his bags and got out a folded tent made to Nye’s order. Gravediggers erect a white tent around the grave they’re working; this one was gray, opaque to lantern light and was meant to blend in with the stone around it when seen from any distance. It’s hard to pitch a tent at night, but we had practiced in Clement’s back yard. The tent went up in five minutes. I got a lantern out of my bag and lit it when we were safely inside with the flap closed. It was a battery-operated model of course, not a Coleman that takes forever to turn on and off.

We were looking at a white marble sarcophagus with a crotch-high enclosure of wrought iron. The pedestal and bust surmounted the lid at the head end, and there was enough room in the tent to walk around the whole works on every side. Clement got his sound equipment out of the other bag and squatted on the cold stone. Nye and I stood perfectly still. Clement plugged two cables into a nondescript gray box, one leading to headphones, one ending in a suction cup with a molded-in diaphragm. He put on the headphones and stuck the suction cup to the floor between his legs. It was like listening to a rail, but not for train wheels. Clement had said he could distinguish the tread of a four-footed animal; he wouldn’t press the panic button if a stray cat happened near. Clement broke the seal of the suction cup with his fingernail and got up. The first check apparently was negative. A strong gust lifted the tent on one side. The anchor ropes tied to the wrought iron kept the tent from overturning, and it settled with a soft plop, no action needed on our part.

Clement moved around to one end of the sarcophagus and plugged three new cables into the gray box. In less than a minute, he had four suction cups fastened to the sarcophagus, two on each side of Dear Departed’s head. A digital screen took the place of headphones; Clement wasn’t listening for other people’s sounds this time. I felt a thrum, a vibration in the stone floor that seemed to mount up my bones, ending as a low ringing in the ears. Clement was scrying with ultrasound, looking for a body in a coffin much as a doctor looks for a fetus in the womb. Nye wasn’t committed to this technique until Clement assured him it didn’t produce high-register sounds that would alert a watchdog. But Nye wasn’t sanguine at the moment and neither was I; Clement obviously didn’t like what he saw on the screen. Clement had a neatly trimmed blonde mustache, shorn in the center of his upper lip. The two halves usually formed a one hundred and twenty-degree angle, but the corners of Clement’s mouth were drooping and the angle had tightened to about sixty degrees. I’d learned to look at this, not the round little blue eyes that never changed expression. “The skull...there isn’t much left of it,” the BBC voice said. “I can’t possibly be wrong.”

Nye didn’t insult Clement by asking to look at the screen himself. It was the first thing that hadn’t gone according to plan and Clement went ahead with backup measures. He listened for prowling footsteps once more, heard nothing and reattached the ultrasound cables, in a different location. If this were a woman’s body, the pelvis would be the next best place to try; Clement fixed the cables lower than that. I like to pace around when I’m thinking, a habit of people who talk in front of blackboards, and I resented having to stand in one spot while I pondered the fate of our man’s skull and how it augured for the mission’s success. Did beetles or other bone-gnawing animals somehow get inside? Was there a chemical in the coffin lining that promoted faster decomposition? I noticed Clement’s face and my worries were suddenly irrelevant. “Both femurs intact,” he said, with a smile that straightened his mustache into a blonde double hyphen.

Clement unplugged the cables from the gray box, leaving them attached to the sarcophagus. Nye unzipped his bag and got out something with a passing resemblance, in appearance and function, to a posthole digger. Breaking open the lid was too big a gamble, Nye had told us. Signs of forced entry would be visible on the outside and there was also the possibility of triggering an alarm. The three of us had held a long Q and A session our first day in Paris, and Nye had the posthole digger ready for deployment tonight, the night before the new moon. I don’t think Nye could have found a dishonest, tight-lipped engineer in a foreign country, given only three weeks; he’d made the posthole digger himself, confirming my suspicion that he was a former safecracker or second-story man, or some other kind of criminal with a high mechanical aptitude. A paper-wrapped bundle of unwilted lilies was on the lid, right where Nye wanted to work. He moved them to the foot of the sarcophagus, and got no further. Clement had his headphones on; his mustache was a blonde quotation mark.

“De...From the south,” he whispered, fighting the mother tongue-reversion of severe stress. Nye set the posthole digger down carefully, and when his hands were clear of it, I killed the lantern in case there might be chinks of light showing through the tent. Clement hadn’t unplugged the ultrasound screen; his face was half-argent, half-merged with the twilit surround. “Deux pied.” The tent flap, on the north side, was right against Nye’s back. Nye turned. He made no noise then or when he opened the flap, but I could just hear the tug of metal against leather as he stepped out. Clement and I waited. To me, all was still; I don’t know what Clement was able to hear. Then two sounds: the ‘kikt’ of a reciprocating slide and the skitter of an ejected casing across stone.

It seemed that Nye walked a few paces more to the south before returning to the tent, but his footsteps, no longer stealthy, were obscured by Clement’s whimpering. Telling Clement to quiet down was the farthest thing from my mind. I knew exactly what sort of man Nye was and I’d hoped this would be a lucrative, strictly bloodless act of thievery. I turned the lantern back on at the very instant Nye pulled the tent flap open. He stood holding the flap in his left hand, and his jagged-toothed smile was impossibly flippant under the circumstances. “You guys like stuffing with apples and chestnuts?” he said. We couldn’t have gotten off two syllables in response before he shoved his right hand into the tent and showed us the biggest damn goose I ever saw. “Well, he did have two legs. He should have stayed down by the pond.”

Relieved laughter rolled out and Nye didn’t order a stop to it. He lowered the goose to the floor and closed the tent flap.

“The shell casing?” I asked.

“I found it. It’s in my pocket. Let’s finish up here.”

Nye held the posthole digger over the lid, verifying the location with Clement. There were baffles around the electric motor and a rubber flange over the contact point, so it was much quieter than any other drill I’d ever heard in operation. Nye watched the built-in level carefully and was lucky enough to hit the mark on his first attempt; the volume increased ever so slightly as the telescoping bit struck into bone. Nye pressed a button on the posthole digger, waited a minute or so, and opened a hatch set into one side. He pulled out a vial of cloudy solution and handed it to me. “All yours, Prof.” I set to work while Nye coaxed the posthole digger out of the lid.

The bulk of my contribution would come later, after we were safely away. For now, I had to know whether we had what we came for or whether Nye would have to keep poking and pumping. Old bones almost always contain mitochondrial DNA, but that wasn’t good enough. I needed a nuclear sequence, complete or cobbled up, and bone marrow a century and a half old isn’t a promising source. I prepared an analysis sample and waited for the CE scanner to report its findings. It turned out that my assignment wasn’t just feasible, it was easy. There was at least one complete nuclear sequence in the sample; I wouldn’t be bothered with an extended job of splicing molecule chains together. I heard the voice of a man dead since the nineteenth century: This is me and none other.  Now you can replicate me at will, make as many genetic copies as you please. Nye and Clement had watched the dawning satisfaction on my face, so it was an anticlimax when I said, “Gentlemen, we’re in business.” Clement made one more security check, again negative, and we were ready to go.

Nye had already plugged the hole in the lid with putty. He moved the bundle of lilies back to its original location, and now nobody would know we’d been here. We stowed our gear, a lengthier task for me because two square feet of floor was covered with the odds and ends I needed to prepare a DNA sample. Our eyes were used to the dark by the time I had the lantern zipped up, and we struck and folded the tent a little faster than we had pitched it. Nye picked up the goose with his free hand—after all, it was his. I took another look at the bust, trying the best I could to read some sort of approval into the starlit bronze visage.

“Why start with him?” I said, in Nye’s apartment back in the states.

Nye explained that this person’s remains were not well guarded, and so were an especially suitable first assignment for untested tools and an untested crew. Reason enough and Nye could have stopped there, but he didn’t. “Besides, I like the way he thought.” That was the only good look I’ve had into Nye’s soul.

It was no small enterprise that Nye had planned. All over the world there was buried treasure in the form of historic remains and their undegraded DNA. Nye was going to dig it up, create a veritable catalog that might be titled, Life-Maps of the Dead and Famous. Mount Vernon, Saint Helena, Stratford-on-Avon, the celebrity vaults at Forest Lawn—these and other prime targets were hard to rob, but Nye’s Mission Impossible schemes, or what he’d told me about them, sounded as though they would work. He would need my help with every one, and hire other help on an occasional basis. I knew he’d be glad to dump the unstable Clement. And when the catalog was complete, he would insure he held a monopoly by leaking word of what had been done. Public and private places of final rest would adopt measures sure to defeat the best efforts of Mr. Phelps, and anyone in the market for Nye’s wares could only go to Nye. Of course, all this assumed our not being caught in the act while working up the catalog.

I’d read most of the books on Nye’s living room wall, though not in the original French that Nye had taught himself. They were filled with driven, conniving characters who tried to build empires and often destroyed themselves or others in the process. It was a common complaint that the author understood his ruthless go-getters better than good, contented people, and the conduct of his life bore this out. He had earned a fortune with his pen and lost almost every centime on social climbing and schemes intended to make him richer. Incidentally, I knew from one of his novels that he was interested in science and people who pursued their own reasons for advancing it.

Nye was no easier to see clearly on our way out of the cemetery. Nonetheless, it seemed to me that he’d gained confidence after our first mission. His black outline swung that of the captive goose with the swagger of a successful hunter returning from the field. I had to ask myself, would Balzac admire the man who had rummaged through his bones?

END