Dead Men's Hearts

Dead Men’s Hearts

Aaron Elkins

Chapter One

“All right, then, explain Drbal’s Phenomenon,” Bruno Gustafson demanded.

“Urn… Drbal’s Phenomenon?” Gideon said.

“The fact,” Bruno said, his ruddy face aglow with the pleasures of scholarly debate, “that if you leave an old razor blade in the Great Chamber of Cheops’ pyramid, oriented exactly north-south, in twenty-four hours it comes out sharp as new. This is a known fact, proved by Drbal. He could shave two hundred times with the same Gillette Blue blade.”

“Oh,” Gideon said, “that Drbal.” He sipped his Scotch-and-water. “Well—”

Bruno’s wife saved him, for the moment at least. “I thought it was Khufu’s pyramid,” Bea Gustafson said matter-of-factly.

“Same guy,” Bruno said. “But the thing is, it could have been anybody’s pyramid. Drbal made himself a mint selling little cardboard razor-blade sharpeners shaped like pyramids. Czechoslovakian patent number 91304. Don’t ask me why I remember.”

“Fascinating,” Rupert Armstrong LeMoyne said, beaming over his white wine. “Absolutely fascinating.”

That had been about the level of Rupert’s participation so far. This, Gideon thought, was understandable behavior from the University of Washington’s vice-president for development in the presence of Bea and Bruno Gustafson of Walla Walla, the alumni couple whose contributions to the school had been $150,000 in each of the last two years. Gideon also understood why the Gustafsons had been treated to a string of receptions over the past two days, had been given twelfth-row seats smack on the fifty-yard line for Saturday’s sell-out game between the Huskies and Arizona, and were now being entertained with drinks and hors d’oeuvres in the faculty club bar, prior to being escorted upstairs for dinner.

What Gideon didn’t understand was what
he
was doing there. He and Julie.

“What do you suppose accounts for it?” asked the fascinated Rupert. “Vibrations or something?”‘ Rupert’s academic training, long in business administration, was a little short in the sciences.

“Well, that’s an interesting question,” Bruno said. “I think that the idea is that a pyramid shape is like a, well, like some kind of a, a—”

“Resonator,” Bea said. “This fried mozzarella is wonderful, don’t you think so, Julie?”

“It certainly is,” said Julie, who hadn’t had the opportunity to say very much thus far.

“Resonator, right,” said Bruno. “For different kinds of— well, unknown frequencies from different parts of the, um, uh, cosmos.” He seemed to realize this was a bit weak. “Did you know that if you keep yogurt in a pyramid-shaped carton it just about never spoils?” he added, by way of strengthening his argument. “Known fact. They sell it that way in France. I’m thinking of test-marketing it here. Cheops’ Yogurt, what do you think? I don’t see how it can miss.”

Rupert shook his head appreciatively back and forth while he swallowed a mouthful of cracker and pate“ preparatory to speaking.

Just fascinating
, Gideon said to himself.

“Just
fascinating,”
Rupert said. He dusted his lips with a cocktail napkin. “Well, if everyone is ready, suppose we trot along upstairs to dinner?”

On the steps, he and Gideon brought up the rear.

“Rupert, what am I doing here?”

“Shh, they asked for you specifically.”

“They probably want me to endorse Cheops’ Yogurt. You know, I just might do it.”

“Gideon, don’t be funny, please. It makes me nervous.”

“But only if he meets my price.”

Rupert’s fingers dug imploringly into his upper arm. “Gideon, be
good.
It’s not his fault if he’s a little odd.”

Bruno Gustafson was certainly a little odd. Jolly, red-faced, and sociable, he was one of those businessmen who didn’t have any business in particular. He had built (and lost) fortunes in plastics, in metal fabrication, and in food services. Reputedly a onetime pal of Spiro Agnew’s, he had been ambassador to Suriname (or was it St. Kitts?) for a few months during the Nixon administration. Now he developed commercial real estate in eastern Washington, dabbled in dairy farming, and pursued obscure studies in Egyptology, or rather on the loony fringes of Egyptology.

Gideon had met him three or four times, at one university function or another, and each time Bruno had eagerly peppered him with one crackpot theory or another. Last time it had been the proposition that the pyramids had been built as huge protective baffles by Egyptian priest-scientists who had discovered how to utilize the energy of the Van Allen belts by transporting it to earth along ionized laser beam paths. A slight accident in calculation, Bruno had told him, had created a momentary overabundance of power that had knocked the planet off its axis in 3001 B.C., prematurely ending experimentation along this line.

Despite all this, or possibly on account of it, Gideon had taken a liking to Bruno. He liked his energy and his amiable-ness, he liked his open-handed philanthropy, and he liked the enthusiasm with which he’d attacked Egyptology, even if he’d made straight for some of its nuttier byways.

He liked Bea Gustafson too. An intelligent, feisty, pint-sized woman about Bruno’s age—sixty or sixty-one—she had made a fortune of her own as an investment manager, and was obviously an equal partner, or maybe a little more than an equal partner, in the Gustafsons’ current financial activities. They made a good team: one the visionary, the dreamer, the man with the big but fuzzy ideas; the other the clear-eyed, no-nonsense realist who kept their feet on the ground and their cash flow positive.

Once upstairs, Rupert led the way to a table at the big window and arranged for Bruno and Bea to sit facing eastward, looking out over a spectacular view that took in Lake Washington with the floating—and occasionally sinking— Evergreen Point bridge in the foreground, and, farther off, the thrusting, jagged wall of the Cascades, glinting with an early layering of snow.

The setting wasn’t wasted on Bruno. “Some view,” he said appreciatively. “Right out over Husky Stadium.”

But as soon as they were seated, he was back to his subject, addressing them all. “Did you know that in 1799, Napoleon asked his men to leave him alone inside the Great Pyramid for a few minutes, just like Alexander the Great did, back in—whenever it was. And when he came out he was white as a ghost. When they asked him about it, all he did was shake his head and tell them he never wanted to talk about it again. No one’s ever been able to explain it.”

“If it smelled the way it did when I was there,” Gideon said, “I think I might be able to explain it.”

A smaller man might have taken offense, but Bruno merely laughed his happy laugh. “Okay, but there’s
some
kind of energy there. Explain to me why, if you wrap a wine bottle in a damp newspaper and stand on the very top of the pyramid, and hold it up above your head, and the conditions are right, sparks come out of—”

“Honey,” Bea said, “give the poor man some rest. Let’s go get our food, and then make your pitch.”

It was Mediterranean buffet night at the faculty club. Julie and Gideon found themselves facing each other across the salad section of the buffet table, over platters of hummus, cold stuffed grape leaves, and feta-cheese-and-tomato salad.

“Not that I’m not having a good time,” Julie said, “but have you figured out what this is about yet?”

Gideon shook his head. They’d been wondering since Rupert had called to ask them to dinner. Gideon taught at the university’s Port Angeles branch, sixty miles and a half-hour ferry ride from the main campus in Seattle, and didn’t ordinarily come into the city more than once every two or three weeks. Julie, a supervising ranger at Olympic National Park’s Port Angeles headquarters, got in even less frequently. It had been six months since their last meal at the faculty club. And never before had they gotten an invitation from Rupert LeMoyne.

But this had been more like a summons than an invitation, and Rupert had been firm about Julie’s attendance as well. “The Gustafsons would like her to be there too,” was all he could, or would, say.

“Whatever his pitch is, you’d better say yes,” Julie told him, ladling yogurt dressing onto her salad, “or poor Rupert is liable to disintegrate right in front of us.”

“Well, you know, he has a tough job,” Gideon said charitably.

Back at the table, Rupert turned the wine list over to Bruno, who proved unpretentiously knowledgeable. A bottle of St. Emilion and another of Oregon Pinot Gris were chosen to go with the main course, the black-tied waitress was sent on her way, and business was gotten down to.

“I’ll bet you’ve been trying to figure out why we asked Rupert to bring you two along today,” Bruno said.

“Not at all,” Gideon said. “It’s nice to be invited.”

“Well, we have a proposition to make. Rupert, you listen up too.”

Rupert listened up.

“What we have in mind, Gideon—why don’t you explain it, hon?”

“Sure,” Bea said. “We’d like you—”

“We being the Horizon Foundation,” Bruno said. “I’m on the board, you know.”

“We’d like you,” Bea said again, “to be part of a project—”

“This has been in the planning stages for over a year,” Bruno said.

“Honey,” Bea sang, “if you want to explain it, go right ahead.”

“No, no, you go ahead.”

“All right, then.” She waited a moment to see if he meant it, then went on. “The foundation is going to do a documentary—”

“You’re going to like this,” Bruno got in, then flinched back into his chair under the force of Bea’s scowl and let her finish.

Gideon didn’t like it.

The Horizon Foundation was a nonprofit, Philadelphia-based institution that endowed archaeological projects around the world, among them the work of the famous Horizon House in Luxor. When the foundation’s board of directors had concluded that the Horizon House endowment was in need of beefing up after thirty years of inflation, Bruno had come up with the idea of a promotional and educational video on their activities. More than that, he and Bea had volunteered to underwrite it. The Gustafsons, who made yearly visits to Egypt anyway, would be going there at the end of November—in six weeks—to accompany the documentary crew that would tape
Reclaiming History: The Story of Horizon House.

So far, so good. But what they were asking now—the “pitch”—was that Gideon come along to serve as one of the narrators; a sort of color-man, according to Bea, who would provide general information on ancient Egypt and its inhabitants to balance the drier, more specialized presentations by Horizon staff members. In return, and on the assumption that he would refuse personal remuneration, they would be pleased to make a token donation of $25,000 earmarked for the anthropology department. Over and above their annual contribution, naturally.

“Why, that’s
extremely
generous,” Rupert burbled. “Gideon, that being the case,” he said slyly, “I think we might see our way after all to getting you that Grenz X-ray unit you’ve been asking for. You could find all those foreign particles you’re always after. What do you say?”

“I don’t think so,” Gideon said reluctantly.

Even Julie looked surprised.

Well, he was flattered, Gideon explained, but his field was Pleistocene evolution, not Egyptology; his sole claim to hands-on experience in the latter was three weeks in Egypt, during which he’d helped measure and analyze a skeletal collection from the Twelfth Dynasty. He’d spent almost the whole of it in the dingy basement of the Cairo Museum, escaping only the final week for a whirlwind tour by Volkswagen bus into Upper Egypt, hoping to make it to Luxor, but getting only as far south as Abydos. He’d stopped at all the
de rigueur
monuments—the pyramids, Memphis, Saqqara, Beni Hassan—sometimes three in a day, and by the time he’d staggered out of the last one, they’d all started to look alike to him. Now, six years later, they were little more than a blur.

Other than that, the only thing he’d done in Egyptology was to teach a couple of classes in it while the regular professor was on sabbatical, but as he didn’t have to tell them, that hardly made him an expert, and besides, it had been years ago. Getting up in front of a camera and talking about Egyptology would make him feel like a fraud, he said, and an interloper besides. Why not turn to a recognized expert in the field?

“I’ll tell you why,” Bruno said, “first, because there aren’t as many recognized experts as you think, and second, we’re not doing a movie for professional anthropologists, we’re doing it for businessmen who might want to give a few bucks, and for high school students who might want to learn a few things, so we don’t need any fancy scientific gobbledygook. What we need is someone personable, someone who can talk in front of a camera in understandable language.”

“Yes, but—”

“Look, it also doesn’t hurt that you happen to be Gideon Oliver,
the
Skeleton Detective. That’ll catch people’s attention. How many Egyptologists are celebrities?”

A reference to the nickname that had clung to him like a barnacle since his first publicized forensic case was not the best way to win Gideon over. He scowled down at his plate. “I’m not—”