Dead Men's Hearts (16 page)

He paused. “Is there something the matter? You’re frowning.”

Yes, something was the matter. What kind of fatal-accident investigation—an unwitnessed accident under ambiguous circumstances—could be wrapped up in an hour, including releasing the remains? Were there to be no lab tests? No interviews? What was going on?

Not that Gideon said this aloud. He wasn’t intimidated by el-Basset—not exactly—but he was well aware that customs varied from one place to another, that he had no status in this, that he was far from his own turf in every sense of the word, and that there was only one driver’s seat and the commanding general’s well-tailored bottom was in it.

Even so, he didn’t see how he could just drop it. “There were some things I wanted to mention about the body,” he said mildly. “Did you happen to notice the marks on his face?”

“Certainly I noticed them, as did Dr. Dowidar. Everything will be contained in the report.”

“You didn’t find them unusual?”

El-Basset smiled, polished and confident. “When a man falls twenty feet onto his head, a few unusual marks are to be expected.”

“He didn’t get these when he fell.”

Gideon explained about the grating. El-Basset heard him out.

“So it may very well be,” he said. “Thank you, I’ll see that it’s put in the report.”

Gideon stared at him. Put it in the report without checking for himself? “I think it raises some questions,” he said. “General, it’s been my experience that when you find facial impact abrasions from a fall, they indicate that the person wasn’t conscious when he fell.”

“Has it? In
my
experience, not necessarily,” el-Basset said pleasantly. “But let’s say you’re right. Tell me, what are these questions that are raised?”

He lit a second cigarette from the first, settled back with his arms crossed, and gave Gideon his attention. It was hard to miss the point: el-Basset would listen, but Gideon had only one more cigarette’s worth of time. There were other things on el-Basset’s plate, other places to be.

“Questions as to just what happened,” Gideon said. “How does a man who collapses unconscious on the upper deck end up over the side?”‘

“How? He arises, then collapses a second time. Dr. Had-don had had a great deal to drink. Dr. Haddon, like many elderly people, was also taking antidepressant medication for his chronic depression.”

“He was?” Gideon said.

If it was true, it cleared up something that had been bothering him. Haddon had been drinking, but not recklessly; not to a fall-down-drunk-and-pass-out-cold degree. But even a couple of drinks combined, say, with one of the tricyclic antidepressants—

El-Basset smiled, pleased at having told Gideon something he hadn’t known. “Oh, yes, I have been talking to people, you know. Our investigation has been quite thorough.”

“Ah,” Gideon said again. You must be an awfully fast talker, he thought.

“Alcohol and drugs,” el-Basset said. “They don’t go well together. What then is so questionable about his falling down while he walks the deck, then picking himself up and falling a second time, but this time, poof, over the side?”

“It doesn’t strike you as unlikely that someone who collapses—goes into a coma—from a combination of drugs and alcohol is going to get up on his own and start walking around again anytime soon? By rights, he ought to still be lying up there.”

Persuasive it may have been with Phil and Julie, but it missed the mark with el-Basset, who tipped his head back to laugh while he blew smoke at the ceiling.

“Yes, it strikes me as unlikely. So? I’m a policeman. If unlikely things didn’t happen every day, what would I have to do? You may trust my judgment, Professor. There is nothing here to require a more serious investigation.”

“I think there is, General.”

El-Basset lifted his hands in mock surrender. “Go on.”

Gideon told him about Haddon’s extraordinary speech the previous evening. El-Basset smiled through it, a gentle, surely-you-can’t-be-serious smile.

“What are you suggesting, my friend? That he was murdered because of something he knew about this Amarna head, something that would be revealed when he showed the head to others?”

“Well… yes. At least, I don’t think the possibility ought to be excluded.”

El-Basset shook his head. “I have noticed this before about you Americans. You have too much crime in America. It makes you suspicious over nothing. You don’t mind my saying this?”

Gideon sighed. Yes, he minded it. “I don’t see what—”

“Consider what you propose,” el-Basset said, leaning over the table. “A statuary head of no great value is removed from its drawer and mysteriously placed in an abandoned enclosure, where it is seen by Dr. Haddon—” The cigarette, down to its last third, was jabbed at Gideon to emphasize the point. “—Dr. Haddon and no one else. During the night it again disappears, only to be found a day later, also by Dr. Haddon, back in its drawer. It has not been stolen. It has not been made off with. It is precisely where it belongs, precisely where it all along would have been if no one had disturbed it.”

He took a final pull on the cigarette and ground it out, smoke purling from his nostrils. “Now, where is a motive to murder anyone in all this?”

Gideon wished he knew, but one was there all right.

Somewhere.

“Look, General,” he said, knowing that it was already too late, that he had struck out before he’d gotten started, “I know you know your business. I just think it might be a good idea to look into things more fully.”

“In what way, more fully?” But his attention was already elsewhere. Gideon had had his chance; the interview was over. El-Basset glanced at his notes before slipping the tablet into his tunic. He slipped his fountain pen into a breast pocket and buttoned the flap. He glanced over the table to see if he was forgetting anything.

“Talk to the people on the ship some more, run some lab tests on Haddon—”

“And delay the ship’s progress? Delay the transfer of Dr. Haddon’s remains?” He laughed at the impossibility of it. “Certainly not. I have seen these things before, many times, and to my eyes we have here a simple case of death by misadventure. However, I will review the matter in light of what you’ve told me.” He stood up and held out his hand. “Thank you for your cooperation, Professor.”

There wasn’t much to do but stand up, shake the proffered hand, and leave.

Game, set, and match. Gideon hadn’t broken serve.

Chapter Fourteen

It took Julie twenty minutes to get him even a little soothed down.

“It’s just that I’ve never been in a situation like this, Julie,” he said, striding back and forth in the deserted Isis Lounge. “I’m practically
sure
Haddon didn’t die accidentally, and I can’t do a damn thing about it. El-Basset just isn’t interested, we’re in a foreign country, there’s no pathologist to speak of, and Haddon’s body is gone anyway—”

“Gideon, you’ve done all you can,” she said sensibly. “The police have been here, you’ve told them what you think, and they’ve come to their conclusions… Gideon, you’re not thinking of pursuing this, are you? On your own, I mean?”

“Of course not.”

“You have been known to do that.”

“Not in Egypt, I haven’t.” He sighed and dropped defeatedly onto the banquette next to Julie. “I don’t know, maybe I ought to try going over the guy’s head.”

Julie laughed. “Great. Except how do you go over the head of a commanding general?”

When they went upstairs at Bea’s request a few minutes later they found everyone gathered on the swimming pool veranda. Bruno was standing with his back to the bar, solemn and ill at ease.

“I just thought you’d all want to know what’s going on. Phil is over at the hospital making sure everything goes smoothly with Dr. Haddon. Apparently he has a sister in Iowa, and that’s where his remains are going. Um, I’ve also been in touch with the board as to whether we ought to go ahead with the documentary or not—”

Gideon thought he saw a small gleam of hope kindle in Forrest’s eye.

“—and the feeling is that we’d like to go ahead with it as planned, if that’s all right with everybody?”

Other than the glow in Forrest’s eye going out, there were no responses. Bruno took it as being all right with everybody.

“And of course,” he went on, “Horizon House will continue its affairs and programs exactly as they were under Dr. Haddon, with TJ here—uh, Dr. Baroff—in charge until the board takes formal action on a replacement.”

“I’ll do my best,” said a sober TJ.

Mr. Wahab, who had been waiting politely on the perimeter, caught Bruno’s attention.

“Excuse me, please, Mr. Gustafson. The caleches are below, as you wished. The visit to the museum at Akhmim can start just now.”

“Great!” Bruno said, his gravity readily departing. “Let’s get everybody down there who wants to go. Let’s get this show on the road.”

“There’s a visit to a museum?” a bemused Jerry said, looking up from cleaning his pipe. “Now?”

“Well, Phil said he’s going to be tied up till eleven,” Bruno explained, “so the boat’s not going anywhere till then anyway, and I just thought people could stand to get off it and get their minds on other things for a while. It’ll be fun. They’re supposed to have a wonderful collection of mummies. Come on everyone, a change of scene will do us good.”‘

Julie leaned toward Gideon as most of the others left in varying states of enthusiasm. “I hate mummies. I think I’ll just stay up here and watch the feluccas.”

“I’ll stay with you,” Gideon said. “I don’t like mummies either.”

Her eyes widened. “Are you serious?”

He nodded. “They’re too naked, too defenseless. I feel embarrassed when I look at them.”

“That’s the way I feel, but isn’t it a little odd coming from you? How can people get any more naked than being skeletons?”‘

“True, but Egyptian mummies were prepared and embalmed so that they’d last forever, and then put in six or seven layers of cloth and wood and stone, and hidden away so no human eyes would ever see them again. And now, there they are, these august dignitaries, moldering away in the open with their noses falling off, and anybody who wants to can walk in and gawk at them for as long as they want. It’s not quite—well, decent.”

Julie tilted her head to study him. “I’ve finally figured out what your problem is. In life, I mean.”

Gideon laughed. “What’s my problem?”

“You’re too squeamish to be a forensic anthropologist.”

He grinned. “Tell me about it.”

When a subdued Phil came back from the hospital and joined them on the deck he was unsurprised by Gideon’s recounting of el-Basset’s refusal to look the facts in the eye.

The Egyptian police, he explained, were in a difficult position at the moment. The tourist trade that was so vital to the economy had fallen off since the fundamentalist unrest and especially the attacks on foreigners had begun. As a result, a worried government was putting a lot of pressure on the police to stay on good terms with foreign countries, particularly countries with thousands of tourists who might visit Egypt. Particularly, in other words, the United States.

“I don’t get it,” Gideon said. “They certainly weren’t trying to stay on particularly good terms with me.”

That wasn’t the point, Phil said. From their point of view, it was bad enough to have a prominent American like Clifford Haddon die in an accident on a Nile steamer, but to turn it into a murder investigation was the last thing in the world they wanted.

“And on top of that to find themselves putting some
other
American on trial?” Phil shook his head while he sucked down iced tea. “To end up having to
execute
him, perhaps? You can forget that.”

“So what are we supposed to do?” Gideon asked grouchily. “Go with the flow?”

Phil’s thin shoulders lifted in a weary shrug. “I suppose so.”

Phil had had a tough morning too. Unshaven and red-eyed, he looked so thoroughly wilted that Gideon didn’t have the heart to pursue it. Besides, he didn’t have any ideas either.

For the rest of the day an edgy, unsettled moodiness prevailed. The
Menshiya
left at 11:30 and made its slow way to Abydos, where there was an afternoon’s taping among the dim, appropriately funereal sanctuaries of the Temple of Seti I. Gideon, backed by the splendid, brooding stone pillars of the Inner Hypostyle Hall, talked about the place of the afterlife in the daily lives of the ancient Egyptians, but his mind wasn’t on it and it went poorly. So did the rest of the shooting, despite Forrest’s desperate efforts to pump some energy into it.

Matters weren’t helped by the arrival of a huge bilingual tourist group whose two guides nattered on unrelentingly in English and French and spurred their grumbling charges from one echoing sanctuary to another with the imperious
tlik-tlak
of hand-clickers. When Forrest finally lost what little patience he had left and screamed at them to be quiet, the frazzled guides screamed back, clicking their clickers in his face. It took two elderly tourist policemen half an hour to settle things down enough for the taping to proceed.

At one point, when Gideon went out into the forecourt to get some fresh air and natural light—and a little quiet—TJ trudged up to him.

“I don’t suppose you’ve seen those stupid ornaments, have you?”

“Huh? What ornaments?”

He had been leaning against the building’s wall, absorbed in looking out at the ramshackle village that sprawled around the temple site. Except for the thatch-roofed tourist compound directly across the dusty street—“Cafeteria Camp. Sandwich hot and cold drink. We sale perfums.”—it looked as if it had been there for millennia, as long as Abydos itself. But it had achieved its remarkably tired and dilapidated look all in this century. He knew because the early photos of Abydos showed the temples sitting all alone in the desert, half-buried in miles of drifting sand. Things aged quickly here.

“Those things Dr. Afifi got out for Arlo. You’re the only one I haven’t asked.”

“No, I haven’t seen them. Why, are they missing?”

“Misplaced, more likely. I called Horizon House from Sohag to check in with Mrs. Ebeid and she told me he called to ask if we happened to take one of the boxes with us. I didn’t even know what she was talking about. Arlo says they never left the room they were laid out in, as far as he knows. He also says they were junk.”