‘That’s a Civil War pennywhistle,’ he said. ‘Music was very important. They used it to tell the time of day.’
Dr. Gruber was the museum’s curator, an older man with bushy gray hair and a face carved of granite. He liked baggy trousers and bow ties. He called me when an exhibit was related to war dead, and I visited him whenever unusual military objects turned up with a body. He could identify virtually any buckle, button or bayonet at a glance.
‘I take it you’ve got something for me to look at?’ he asked, nodding at my briefcase.
‘The photographs I mentioned to you over the phone.’
‘Let’s go to the office. Unless you’d like to look around a bit.’ He smiled like a bashful grandfather talking about his grandchildren. ‘We have quite an exhibit on Desert Storm. And General Eisenhower’s mess uniform. I don’t believe that was here when you were here last.’
‘Dr. Gruber, please let me do it another time.’ I did not put up any pretenses. My face showed him how I felt.
He patted my shoulder and led me through a back door that took us out of the museum into a loading area where an old trailer painted army green was parked.
‘Belonged to Eisenhower,’ Dr. Gruber said as we walked. ‘He lived in there at times, and it wasn’t too bad unless Churchill visited. Then the cigars. You can imagine.’
We crossed a narrow street, and the snow was blowing harder. My eyes began to water as I again envisioned the pennywhistle in the showcase and thought about the woman we called Jane. I wondered if Gault had ever come here. He seemed to like museums, especially those displaying artifacts of violence. We followed a sidewalk to a small beige building I had visited before. During World War II it had been a filling station for the army. Now it was the repository for the Quartermaster archives.
Dr. Gruber unlocked a door and we entered a room crowded with tables and manikins wearing uniforms from antiquity. Tables were covered with the paperwork necessary to catalog acquisitions. In back was a large storage area where the heat was turned low and aisles were lined with large metal cabinets containing clothing, parachutes, mess kits, goggles, glasses. What we were interested in was found in large wooden cabinets against a wall.
‘May I see what you’ve got?’ Dr. Gruber asked, turning on more lights. ‘I apologize about the temperature, but we’ve got to keep it cold.’
I opened my briefcase and pulled out an envelope, from which I slid several eight-by-ten black-and-white photographs of the footprints found in Central Park. Mainly, I cared about those we believed had been left by Gault. I showed the photographs to Dr. Gruber, and he moved them closer to a light.
1 realize it’s rather difficult to see since they were left in snow,’ I said. ‘I wish there were a little more shadow for contrast.’
‘This is quite all right. I’m getting a very good idea. This is definitely military, and it’s the logotype that fascinates me.’
I looked on as he pointed to a circular area on the heel that had a tail on one side.
‘Plus you’ve got this area of raised diamonds down here and two holes, see?’ He showed me. ‘Those could be shoe grip holes for climbing trees.’ He handed the photographs to me. ‘This looks very familiar.’
He went to a cabinet and opened its double doors, revealing rows of army boots on shelves. One by one he picked up boots and turned them over to look at the soles. Then he went to the second cabinet, opened its doors and started again. Toward the back he pulled out a boot with green canvas uppers, brown leather reinforcements and two brown leather straps with buckles at the top. He turned it over.
‘May I see the photographs again, please?’
I held them close to the boot. The sole was black rubber with a variety of patterns. There were nail holes, stitching, wavy tread and pebble grain. A large oval at the ball of the foot was raised diamond tread with the shoe grip holes that were so clear in the photographs. On the heel was a wreath with a ribbon that seemed to match the tail barely visible in the snow and also on the side of Davila’s head where we believed Gault’s heel had struck him.