Dead men’s hearts

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.

Dead Men's Hearts

Aaron Elkins – Gideon Oliver 08 – Dead Men’s Hearts

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.”

“That’s what I’d say too. You know, a busload of school kids showed up about the time we were leaving. If the boxes were still right there on that table, it could be that one of them walked off with it.”

“Maybe. What would a kid want with stuff like that?”

Gideon shook his head. “What would anybody want with it?”

TJ sighed. “Well, thanks anyway. Hell, if this is the kind of thing the director spends her time on, I’m not so sure I want the damn job.”

They were silent for a few minutes, enjoying the shade of the thick, ancient wall at their back and watching the tour group get herded unwillingly into the Cafeteria Camp across the street.

“Can I say something?” TJ said suddenly. “Forget trying to figure out which one of us killed Haddon.”

Now where had that come from? He’d said nothing to anyone else aboard the ship about those marks, and he was positive that Julie and Phil hadn’t either.

“When did I ever say-”

“It’s all over your face. You’ve been beady-eyeing everybody all day, thinking suspicious thoughts.”

Gideon smiled. That made twice in the last twenty-four hours that he’d been told his face was an open book. He was starting to think there might be something to it.

“It’s not just you,” TJ said as they began to walk along the temple wall. “Hell, it’s only natural. Even I thought about it for a while there. I mean, it was just too weird. He makes all these bizarre statements about that dumb head and his theories and everything, and the next thing you know they find him with his brains bashed out. It’s pretty suspicious. But there’s nothing to it, Gideon.”

“Why isn’t there anything to it?”

“Because,” she said firmly, “there is no head. There never was. He imagined it, that’s all. The story about finding it in the collection later was just his way of saving face; classic Clifford Haddon.”

“Maybe so,” Gideon said.

“Definitely so.” She stopped walking. “Look, the main reason I called Horizon House this morning was to have one of our best grad students go over to the annex and check out the Lambert collection.”

Above them, in the chinks and crevices of a frieze that still had remnants of three-thousand-year-old red and green paint on it, agitated sparrows had begun to dart about and chatter at them. They moved on.

“And there was no yellow jasper head from 1924,” TJ went on. “There were quartzite ones from 1919 and 1920, and some fragments, including yellow jasper ones, from a few different seasons, and most of a limestone head from 1925, I think. Three pretty much complete heads altogether, but none of them from 1924, and none of them yellow jasper. Stacey’s positive.”

“TJ, why would Haddon offer to show us a nonexistent head when we got back? Wouldn’t that make him look like even more of a fool? If he was making it up last night, surely he’d have said it was one of the heads that was there.”

TJ’s smile was almost fond. “Trying to outfigure Clifford Haddon is the world’s quickest way to go bananas. Trust me, I’m speaking from experience.”

“I don’t doubt it, TJ, but the fact that it isn’t there now doesn’t prove it wasn’t there two days ago when he said he saw it.”

“No way, Gideon.” They stood at the head of the long, wide stone steps leading up to the temple mound for a moment, watching the two Arab men who swept it endlessly with endless patience.

“There’s no yellow jasper head in the collection now,” TJ said unequivocally, “and there never was. Stacey checked the records. Lambert was a lousy archaeologist, but he was a careful collector. Every artifact in that collection, every potsherd, got its own number and its own object card with all the pertinent information on it. And there is no record of a yellow jasper Amarna head. In 1924 or any other year. Stacey checked every card in the file, and if she says it isn’t there, it isn’t there. Talk to her yourself when we get back.”

“I believe you,” Gideon said truthfully.

“So there was no reason for anybody to kill him.” She shrugged. “It was an accident, Gideon.”

Strange. El-Basset said there wasn’t any reason to murder Haddon over the head because it was in the collection. TJ said there wasn’t any reason because it wasn’t in the collection. The odd thing was, both of them made sense. Either way, there wasn’t any reason for anyone to kill Haddon.

But somebody had. If not over the head, then over something else.

On the ship that evening dinner was a muted affair. Afterward, as previously arranged, Mr. Wahab showed Death on the Nile in the Isis Lounge, while they continued to sail upriver. It was not quite the hit it might have been twenty-four hours earlier.

On Friday, the long cruise to Dendera for a few more hours’ shooting, with nothing to do but sit on the deck and watch the scenery slip by, began to have its effect. They fell into the rhythm of the Nile, the rhythm of Egypt, where man-made time partitions-this is play time, this is work time, this is rest time-fell away. For the Americans, the only things that shaped their day came from outside themselves, beyond their control: breakfast, teatime, lunch, teatime, cocktails, dinner. Brows cleared. Laughter and casual conversation came more easily. If anybody besides Phil, Julie, and Gideon was troubled by the circumstances of Haddon’s death, it wasn’t evident.

In the late afternoon, with the ship moored near Dendera, people sat on the upper deck over their tea or coffee and watched half a dozen men fishing from brightly painted row-boats near the far shore. They worked two to a boat, with one man lustily beating the water with an oar and the other manipulating a long, narrow net that trailed behind.

“I’ve seen that before,” Forrest said. “What’s the point of all that splashing?”

“It’s supposed to scare the fish into the net,” Phil explained.

“They’ve been fishing like that for thousands of years,” put in Arlo. “I’ve seen pictures from the Twelfth Dynasty of them doing it just that way.”

“Well,” said Bruno, “that proves something I’ve always said about fish.”

Bea looked at him. “Which is?”

“Darned slow learners.”

Late Saturday morning they finished shooting at Dendera, then continued upriver, reaching Luxor at 5:00. Mrs. Ebeid had the vans waiting for them, and they were back at Horizon House in time for dinner.

It was the first time in years that Clifford Haddon hadn’t presided at the long table. His chair was left empty.

At 9:20 the next morning Gideon was back on camera and not enjoying himself at all. He was seated comfortably enough, in one of the old-fashioned wicker patio chairs, shaded by a backdrop of trellised oleander, but he didn’t like the subject they had gotten him onto. It had begun, as scheduled, as a discussion of some of the recently developed ways of studying mummies without unwrapping them, such as CAT-scanning and various new image-processing techniques. But somewhere along the way, the topic had been diverted to the racial makeup of the ancient Egyptians.

“The best way to describe the people of dynastic Egypt,” he said, making a third try at it, “is simply as Egyptians; a population derived from various Mediterranean and sub-Saharan roots.”

“Oh, terrific. Now how about telling us what that’s supposed to mean?”

Kermit Feiffer, Forrest’s assistant director, was supervising the shooting while Forrest was editing earlier tapes. Kermit’s directorial technique included frequent interruptions. The interviewee was supposed to respond, but take care not to make it sound as if he were answering questions. No yeses and no nos. And, needless to say, no we Us. Later on he and Forrest would cut and edit as necessary, and record any needed voice-overs.

By now Gideon had gotten the hang of it and liked the informal tone it created-preferred it, in fact, to Forrest’s heavy-handed fluttering-but every now and then Kermit got on his nerves. A golden-bearded, self-admiring man in his early thirties, Kermit seemed to take himself every bit as seriously as Forrest did, but with less apparent justification. Most of the time he seemed to find Reclaiming History tedious in the extreme, so that during the shooting he yawned and fidgeted, and closed his eyes despairingly, and wandered away in despondent circles, and even groaned in torment, which took some getting used to on the part of the interviewee. He had also taken it upon himself to inject controversy and tension into things wherever he could-not an easy task on a talking-heads documentary about ancient history, but Kermit appeared to consider it a personal challenge.

He was amply succeeding with Gideon.

“I mean,”“ the assistant director went on, ”for you to say that the Egyptians were Egyptians sort of begs the question, wouldn’t you say? What race were they? White or black?“ He placed his hands on his narrow hips. ”What’s the problem, afraid to take a position?“

Not afraid, disinclined. Gideon hated the whole subject, first because race, biologically speaking, was a very different and vastly more complex phenomenon than color, a point that anthropologists had done a lousy job of getting across to the public at large. Second, because he found this white-black question tiresome and anthropologically pointless. But mostly because what ought to have been studied in the spirit of scientific inquiry was being twisted into something where the answers came first and the questions came afterward, and when that happened, facts-data-got distorted and stretched, ignored or overemphasized.

Not that it was anything new. The first extensive anatomical study of mummies, made near the beginning of the century, had concluded unconditionally that they were Caucasian. That result had stood unchallenged for all of three years or so. Since then, subsequent investigators, generally reputable, had “proven” the ancient Egyptians to be descended from East Indians, American Indians, Blacks, Mongols, Bushmen, Libyans, Australian aborigines, and Pelasgians, to name only a few. Naturally, each new determination had provoked a fresh furor. And now they were at it again, hotter than ever.

“Asking if the ancient Egyptians were white or black isn’t much different from asking if modern Egyptians are white or black,” he said. “Some are white, some are black, and most are neither. Is Mubarak black? Was Sadat? Are they white? They’re Egyptians; North Africans.”

Kermit was circling back from one of his eye-rolling rambles, humming through his nose now. That meant he was pleased. Probably because Gideon sounded irritated.

“Were some of the rulers black?” Gideon continued. “Sure, the Hyksos rulers were Nubians, and there’s no arguing that they were black. But most, in my opinion, were a type of their own, unique to their time and place.”

“I don’t know,” Kermit said, “my sister’s kid is taking anthropology in high school, and according to her teacher scientific studies now prove that Cleopatra was black, and the same goes for most of the pharaohs. Are you saying she’s wrong!”

Gideon sighed. Maybe he preferred Forrest after all. He gritted his teeth. “I’m saying-”

But he was saved by the appearance of a dark, wiry Egyptian who had come up behind the camera and distracted his attention with a waggle of his fingers.

“Cut, damn it!” Kermit turned furiously on the man. “Who the hell are you? Can’t you see we’re shooting?”

The man tapped his chest. “Ragheb.” He looked thoroughly pleased with himself, the bearer of important tidings.

“And what’s so goddamn important, Ragheb?”

But Ragheb wasn’t there to talk to a mere assistant director. He motioned to Gideon. “Come, please?”

“Come where?” Gideon said. “Is something wrong?”

The man’s eyes gleamed. “Moomy,” he announced proudly.

This time it had been found in the most isolated part of the Horizon compound, a sandy area in the extreme northeast corner that had the lumpy, pitted look of an old garbage dump over which sand and soil had settled with time, and a few scrubby plants had taken tenuous hold. It was in fact an old garbage dump; it was where Cordell Lambert and his coworkers had buried their waste early in the century, when the only things to do with garbage in Luxor had been to bury it or to burn it.

It was also the area in which Haddon had more recently directed that the rubbish from the outdoor storage enclosure, along with the bulldozed wreckage of the enclosure itself, be plowed under. To that end, under Jerry’s supervision, a sizable crater had been gouged in which most of the junk had already been buried. The original pit had not been large enough, however, and now a second, smaller hole had been scooped out by the backhoe. In so doing, it had unearthed trash no different from what might have been in an American landfill of the 1920s: bits of lumber and corrugated cardboard, deteriorating clothing, shoes (some with buttons), rusted tin cans and metal corset bones, and patent medicine containers-including six that were plainly recognizable as Milk of Magnesia bottles. Apparently American stomachs had not rested easily in foreign countries even then.

These had all been brushed off and placed in fiberboard boxes ready for stowing away, presumably for future graduate students desperate for thesis topics to sift through and theorize from.

But the newly found object that had caused Gideon to be summoned was set by itself on the ground at the feet of Jerry Baroff, who regarded it contemplatively, puffing on a pipe. “TJ’s at the dig this morning so they called me. I thought I better call you.”

It was a plain brown paper sack the size of a large grocery bag, crumpled and soil-stained, but not old. Protruding from it was the proximal end of a broken femur, unmistakably human. Inside was a jumble of other bones, no less certainly Homo sapiens.

Gideon looked at Jerry. “Another skeleton? This is getting to be old-hat around here.”

“Not exactly,” Jerry said. He leaned down to point with his pipe at a row of letters on the shaft of the femur.

Gideon bent to read them, then straightened up with a perplexed frown.

“I’ll be damned.”

It wasn’t a row of letters, it was an identification number, written in a precise, spidery, old-fashioned hand.

F4360.