Dead Men's Hearts (20 page)

“Professor Oliver? Perhaps it would be better to consider one murder at a time?”

“Look, Major,” Gideon snapped, “as far as I’m concerned, if you don’t care about letting murderers run around loose, then the hell with it, do what you want. It’s your country.”

It was hardly the way to bring Saleh around, but by now Gideon was feeling patronized and thoroughly surly. It did him good to let off some steam.

Saleh let a moment pass, then surprised him. “Would iv be possible for you to put your findings into a report?” As if Gideon hadn’t just finished jumping down his throat.

It took him a moment to shift gears. “You want me to write them up?”

“If it would cause no difficulty.”

“I’d be glad to.” Was this progress? Had he shamed Saleh into action?

“And if I sent someone to pick it up at, say, four o’clock, it might be ready?”

“It’ll be ready.”

After he hung up Gideon took a walk to get his blood going again—he’d been cooped up with the bones for three hours—but was driven back by the sun into the relative coolness of the high-ceilinged annex. From the main house buffet he brought back a glass of blessedly sugarless iced coffee to sip while he stared moodily at the bones of the unknown man who’d breathed his last in the enclosure perhaps five years ago. He wasn’t sure whether he’d gotten a brush-off from Saleh or not, but the major would get his report. And that would have to be that, however Gideon felt about it. He didn’t see any way to fight the entire Egyptian bureaucracy, and solving crimes without the police was Phil’s approach to things, not his.

The basic skeletal work had been done: sexing, aging, racing, stature estimation (that had taken a call to a Cambridge colleague for the Trotter-Gleser multiple regression formulas), and so on. And, of course, the probable cause of death. All in all, he’d pulled a fair amount of information from this chewed-up cluster of scraps, but he had yet to come up with what he wanted most: an alternative explanation for the assemblage of traits that so perfectly mimicked the pattern that went along with a life as a scribe. What
had
he been or done? What habitual patterns of behavior had left that distinctive and unusual record in his skeleton?

He separated the offending bones and laid them out in front of him: the innominates with their roughened ischial tuberosities; the bowed fibula; the finger bone with its marked ligament-attachment lines. To them he added a metacarpal that also had some unusually prominent areas of ligament attachment, and one other oddity that had puzzled him from the beginning: the skull with its unusual tooth wear pattern: incisors worn down almost to nubs, while the molars showed only moderate wear. Humans did their chewing with their back teeth; if you were going to get extensive attrition anywhere, it ought to be on the molars.

It was the second time he had looked at them all in a row like this, and once again he had the feeling that the answer was there, right in front of him, just out of reach. In finger-snapping distance, so to speak.

It was possible, of course, that there was no single explanation, that each trait had a separate, unrelated cause, but he couldn’t make himself quite believe that. There was a configuration here, a constellation that taken as a whole made sense if he could only comprehend it. For the dozenth time he picked up the fibula, the phalanx, the inominate. He fingered them, turned them over, put them down. He sat on a high stool, his heels hooked over the rungs, and chewed ice from the coffee. He picked them up again.

Five minutes later he snapped his fingers.

At 4:10, a police constable with smudged glasses and only a few words of English came to get the report, which Gideon had typed on a forty-year-old Remington he’d found in a dusty office. After considerable protest and two calls to police headquarters the constable reluctantly agreed to take away the skeletal material, which Gideon felt would be better off in the police vault than lying around Horizon House, prey to who knows what new drollery.

Once the constable had left with his unwelcome burden, Gideon washed up and went to the other workroom, where some of the students had regathered to number pottery and gossip some more about Haddon’s death.

“Excuse me, is one of you Stacey?”

A young black woman with a scarf around her head looked up from the row of potsherds on the table in front of her. 1 am.

“Stacey,” Gideon said, “do you suppose I could have a few minutes of your time?”

Chapter Seventeen

“Welcome in Egypt! Where you want to go?”

As soon as they’d stepped through the Horizon House gate they had flagged down (or rather been flagged down by) one of the string of caleche drivers who lounged along the curb, polishing the tin decorations on their carriages, chatting with each other, and smoking cigarettes.

“Shari Tahrir,” Phil told him, heaving himself up to ride shotgun beside the driver while Julie and Gideon climbed into the hansom’s regal passenger seats.

They had had predinner gin-and-tonics in Phil’s room, where the window fan was marginally better (if noisier) than their own, and infinitely superior to the gurgling, rattling, next-to-useless air-conditioning that had been turned on in the main house the instant the temperature had hit a hundred degrees.

Julie, who had spent the day putting in volunteer labor at WV-29, TJ’s dig across the river, had needed to be filled in on things, and an hour’s discussion of Horizon House foul play, past and present, had left all three without much inclination to have dinner with the others in the dining room. (Please pass the salt.
Hm, I wonder if he/she is the one who bumped off Clifford Haddon.)
At the same time, they were sensing some reciprocal discomfort on the part of the others, as if their suspicions and Gideon’s continued contact with the police were general knowledge, which they probably were.

That being the case, Phil suggested that they go “grazing” at some of his new
On the Cheap
finds—where the real people ate, and at no more than five dollars a head, tips included.

“But no lamb’s eyeballs, agreed?” Gideon said now, as the driver set the well-decorated but swaybacked horse more or less in motion. “No fatted sheep’s tails.”

Phil turned in his seat to gaze pityingly down on him. “Julie, when did this man get to be such a wimp?”

“I can tell you exactly when,” Gideon said. “Two years ago, in Madrid, when you took me to the tapas bars where the ‘real’ people went. A distinguishing characteristic of real people,” he said to Julie, “seems to be a proclivity to be a little careless about waste disposal. We were up to our knees in shrimp crania, fish bones, and spit all night long.”

Julie laughed. “Do shrimp have crania?”

“Sure they have crania. And they crackle when you step on them.”

“But what about the tapas?” Phil asked. “Good or not good?”

“Not bad,” admitted Gideon.

“Well, I suppose that was a fairly rough crowd,” Phil admitted in his turn, “but nothing like that tonight. You may put your faith in me. We won’t go anywhere that I wouldn’t recommend to my readers.”

“That’s what worries me,” Gideon said.

The driver, who had been waiting for a pause in the conversation, joined in with a dazzling smile. “I, Gamal. Horse, Napoleon. You go
souks!
You want to buy Egyptian rug, Egyptian hat? I show you best place, no extra charge.”

Phil murmured a few fluid sentences in Arabic. Gamal, after registering his amazement, haughtily ignored them and gave his attention to nudging Napoleon along at a dignified pace befitting both its name and the weather. At a little after 6 p.m. the sun’s rays were no longer searing anything they hit, but the evening breeze off the Nile had yet to spring up and the temperature was still an unseasonably warm hundreddegrees. The feeble stir of air created by Napoleon’s ambling along was welcome.

They drove into central Luxor on the jammed Corniche and were soon towered over by smog-belching trucks and sleek tourist buses with sinister black windows. Bicyclists darted death-defyingly around and between motor vehicles. Automobile-tired carts of vegetables dragged by slow, weary donkeys set off long fits of hysterical horn-blowing in their wakes, to which their nodding drivers, probably dreaming of the dinners awaiting them in their villages, seemed totally oblivious.

Gamal did what he could to add to the bedlam, frequently standing up to brandish his whip and berate truck and bus drivers, who replied with tooth-rattling air-horn blasts that detonated lively, long-lasting chain reactions in every direction. Bicyclists and pedestrians were hissed and screamed at by Gamal, who replied in kind.

Evening traffic, Gideon had noticed, was no thicker than morning traffic, but always a good deal crazier. Egypt in general seemed to be at its most relaxed in the morning, to undergo a steady increase in nervous tension through the day, and to be at its peak of frenzy in the evening. Phil’s theory was that it was a combination of the steadily building heat, the ordinary frustrations of city life, and the cumulative effect of all those potent little cups of coffee the Arab world consumed, uncountered by the decompressing influence of alcohol in the form of the gin-and-tonics that European visitors were gasping for by late afternoon.

Just north of Luxor Temple they turned from the choked Corniche onto a crooked, shop-lined street not much wider than the caleche itself. Within two blocks they had left most of the traffic and nine-tenths of the tourists behind. “Pharaonic art,” decorated papyrus mats, and painted heads of Nefertiti were gone from the shop windows, along with signs in French and English. The very shops and windows themselves had disappeared, to be replaced by a warren of open-air stalls—
souks
—with their wooden shutters folded aside to let in the breeze—and let out the aromas. The warm air was heavy with the ancient fragrances of the Oriental bazaar: coriander, saffron, cinnamon, ginger, roasting lamb, baking bread.

Julie sat up and sniffed like a dog that hears its bowl rattled. “I’m
starving.
Aren’t we ever going to eat?”

“Right now,” Phil said. “Here,” he told the driver.

But Gamal couldn’t bring himself to let a good thing go without one more try. “No, no, I know much better place. More good prices, nicer peoples.”

“Here,” Phil said firmly.

Comforted by a substantial tip, Gamal capitulated and dropped them off near a blue donkey cart set up soup-kitchen style, with a perspiring old man and a young boy standing in a cloud of steam behind two dented, blackened kettles. There they ladled out bowls of stew to a crowd of men clutching grimy one-pound notes and an occasional woman hardy enough to elbow her way through the mob.

“Madame, monsieur, les hors d’oeuvres,”
Phil announced. “Here we have the stand of Mr. Farag Shash, famous among those in the know. The best
fuul
in Luxor.”

It was certainly the most popular. There were twenty people clustered around the wagon, with others taking the place of everyone who left with a filled bowl. Diners sat at seven or eight newspaper-covered folding picnic tables set up helter-skelter in the street, lapping it up and hissing for more, which was delivered by a second teenager in a stained
galabiya
who poured it out of a spouted metal jug. Others ate leaning against walls or simply standing up. It took Gideon, Julie, and Phil five minutes to work their way to the front of the crowd, plunk down their pound notes—about thirty cents—and then fight their way, spoons and bowls in hand, back out through the hungry gaggle around the cart.

“Whew,” Julie said.

“I heard Bea grumbling the other day about how much better the Egyptians would get along in life if only they learned to stand in line,” Phil said.

“Bea has a point,” Gideon said. “Pardon my cultural absolutism.”

Phil shook his head. “It’s a good thing he likes bones,” he said to Julie. “He’d never have made it as a cultural anthropologist.”

They were lucky in getting a just-vacated table with three chairs, under a red, white, and green umbrella that proclaimed
Corona Extra, La Cerveza Mas Firm.
The sheets of newspaper on the table hadn’t been changed for a while, but the stew smelled wonderful, the setting was agreeably exotic, and Gideon was glad to be just where he was, doing just what he was doing, with just the people he was with.
Fuul
was the nearest thing to a national dish that Egypt had; a paste of mashed fava beans prepared in a hundred different ways. Gideon had tried a good dozen and had liked most of them, but he was ready to agree that Mr. Shash’s version won hands-down.

For several minutes they ate in animated silence, wolfing down the mixture of beans, garlic, onions, oil, and spices. When they had eaten enough to slow down a little, Julie spoke pensively, having ruminated on their earlier discussion for an hour.

“So now we have two murders: Dr. Haddon and an unknown Egyptian—both of them, we think, having something to do with an Amarna head seen by Dr. Haddon, except that he never saw it because it was never there.”

“Well, I’ve been giving that some thought,” Gideon said. “I think it
was
there.”

Phil looked up from his bowl. “There in the enclosure or there in the drawer?”

“Both, just the way he said. Think about it: why would he give us a detailed description—yellow jasper, five inches high, dug in 1924—of something that wasn’t there? If he was trying to save face, wouldn’t he have described one that
was
there, so he could show it to us when we got back to Luxor? Why would he go out of his way to promise to show us something that he knew wasn’t going to be there to show?”

Phil considered. “How do you explain it, then?”

“Easy,” Gideon said. “Haddon did see it in the enclosure, and later he saw it in the drawer, exactly as he said, because someone took it out of the enclosure and put it there. And then, afterward, someone—probably the same someone— came along and took it out of the drawer and put it someplace else.”

“And why would this someone be doing these curious things?”

“I think it went into the drawer because that was where it belonged; it was a perfect place to ‘hide’ it as long as no one was looking for it. I think it was taken
out
of the drawer when Haddon started talking about having seen it and getting people excited.”