Dead men’s hearts

Chapter Nineteen

“For you, Gideon,” Bea said, holding out the telephone.

Gideon dabbed at his mouth with a napkin and walked around the end of the table, around Haddon’s still-empty chair, to take the call. Lunch, which had begun at eleven o’clock on account of a full afternoon shooting schedule, was just ending and Bea, sitting closest to the wall table on which it was situated, had reached behind her to pick the telephone up, not pausing in her attentions to a cup of sherbet.

It was Mrs. Ebeid. “The police are calling for you again,” she said. “Will you speak with them this time?”

“I would have spoken with them last time,” Gideon said, “but I didn’t hear the phone-”

“Dr. Oliver? I am Sergeant Gabra. I have been reading your report with interest. May we discuss it this same afternoon?”

Well, what do you know. Somebody at the police department actually gave a damn after all. Gideon swallowed his amazement.

“Sure, when would you like?”

The only thing he had scheduled was a one o’clock session with Forrest and Kermit to reshoot the previous day’s interrupted segment on race, and he was more than happy to put it off, even at the cost of further frazzling poor Forrest. Maybe if he put it off enough times, Forrest would decide to forget about it altogether.

“Would one o’clock be convenient? I will come there.”

“Perfect,” Gideon said happily. “Why don’t we meet in the library? I think we’ll have it to ourselves.”

“Very good.”

“Sergeant? You’ve decided to pursue this then?”

“I would think so. And-” There was a pause. “Your views on the death of Dr. Haddon, which you attached to your report? I would be interested to hear more.”

Gideon topped off his coffee at the urn and slipped into the chair beside Julie again. He’d thought he was finished eating but now he reached for a few more dates from the fruit bowl.

“Things,” he said, “are looking up.”

Sergeant Monir Gabra was a weathered, gravel-voiced man in his mid-fifties with most of one earlobe missing and an old knife scar on his cheek beside it to make clear how it had happened. He was wearing a brown woolen uniform, past its prime and closer in its styling to that of the el-Amarna private with the pinned-on stripe (not that Gabra’s stripes were anything but firmly attached) than to the splendid outfit of the commanding general of River and Tourist Police. With his ample black mustache and glistening, foxy, slightly bulbous eyes, simply changing from the uniform into a galabiya would have let him pass with ease as a seller of dried spices or inlaid cigarette boxes in the souks.

All in all, Gideon had the feeling he was going to get further with the sergeant than he had so far done with his boss; a hunch that quickly proved accurate.

Under the high, groined ceiling of the otherwise deserted library, seated across one of the monograph-littered tables from Gideon, smoking one cigarette after another, asking frequent questions in his shaky English, he had listened to everything Gideon had had to say about the unidentified remains, about Haddon, about the Amarna head.

“Well then,” he said when there wasn’t anything more, “I think you are right. We have here a police matter.”

Gideon, who’d come to the meeting not knowing what to expect, felt like a spent runner who’d finally managed to pass the baton. From now on it was Gabra’s job to do the worrying and suspecting.

“I’m happy to hear you say it. After my experience with General el-Basset, I wasn’t quite sure what your reaction would be.”

“Well, you must make allowances for General el-Basset,” Gabra said. Did “And for Major Saleh” hang in the air, or was Gideon imagining it?

“Here we do things differently,” Gabra said complacently. “Already we are making progress, you see. We have succeeded to identify the remains.”

In one day? They did things differently, all right. “Who is it?”

As always, he was curious to know where he’d gone right and where he’d gone wrong in reconstructing the onetime owner of those bones. But this time he was leery too. He’d already botched this one once, and now he was thinking that he’d probably gone out a bit too recklessly on another long limb or two.

Gabra, who smoked like most of the Egyptians Gideon had met, which was to say incessantly, lit up again. “Did you know this, that since four years, on ninth of October, 1989, there was a robbery at site number WV-29, resulting in the death of a policeman?”

“No, I didn’t. What does-”

“That the person believed to do this was one Abdul Nasr el-Hamid, who has worked in Horizon House until shortly before this theft and murder? That he has not been seen alive since this theft and murder? That this Mr. Abdul Nasr el-Hamid was forty-six years old and 172 centimeters tall, and that in addition to being a tomb-robber he was by trade a tailor? That his right eye was lower than the left?”

After a moment’s silence Gideon let out a peal of triumphant laughter that would have shocked anybody but a seasoned cop or another forensic scientist. He was used to hitting nails on the head, but not all of them at once.

“I was lucky,” he said.

“May we continue to have such luck,” Gabra said. “Ah, the object that was stolen will interest you, I think. It was asmall, Amarna sandstone statue-a statuette-that was without its head.” He smiled. “You see? A small Amarna statue with no head is taken from the excavation on the one hand… and now a small Amarna head with no statue is found in the enclosure on the other. Would you say these events are coincidence?”

Not unless somebody had just repealed Abe Goldstein’s old dictum, the Law of Interconnected Monkey Business, they weren’t. When that many queer, related things were going on around one another, they had to be connected: the headless body, the bodiless head, the death of Abdul Nasr el-Hamid in 1989, the death of Clifford Haddon four years later.

“There is more,” Gabra said. “This Abdul Nasr el-Hamid was a member of the el-Hamid family of Nag el-Azab, who have been known to commit tomb-robbing for many years.”

“I see. Sergeant-”

“Ss,” Gabra said with his eyes focused over Gideon’s shoulder. Gideon turned to see a highly agitated Arlo Gerber in the doorway, his wispy mustache twitching.

“Yes?” Gabra said.

Arlo jumped. “That man. I-I can tell you who he was.”

“Man?” Gabra said. “And you are…?”

Arlo licked his lips. “I am…?”

Gideon helped him out. “This is Dr. Arlo Gerber, head of the epigraphic unit.”

“His name was Abdul,” Arlo blurted. “He used to work here.”

“Oh, yes?” Gabra said. “That is interesting. And what did this Abdul look like?”

“Look like?” Arlo was thoroughly disconcerted. He had come here to say something. He had planned it and rehearsed it, and Gabra had thrown him off his stride. Arlo’s hands fluttered indecisively. “He was… he had a…” His hand went to his face and pulled the right cheek down.

Gabra glanced meaningfully at Gideon.

“I can also tell you who killed him,” Arlo said.

“Ah,” Gabra said softly, “now this I would very much like to hear.”

“Well, it was, um-well, it was sort of-”

“Would you like to sit down, Dr. Gerber?”

“No thank you,” Arlo said mechanically, at the same time seating himself in a wooden chair on Gideon’s side of the table. He looked utterly flustered. “Could I please have one of those?” he said, gesturing at Gabra’s Cleopatras.

“Certainly.” Gabra held out the pack and lit Arlo’s cigarette with a lighter. Gideon hadn’t seen him smoke before.

Arlo’s fingers shook as he brought the cigarette to his lips. He inhaled with his eyes closed. His color improved slightly.

“It was me,” he said. “But it was an accident.”

Well, it was and it wasn’t. El-Hamid’s death, as Gideon had thought, had been caused by a fall. But the fall had been caused by Arlo. Directly and precipitately. As Arlo told it, he had surprised el-Hamid one night, walking out the back door of the annex with an Amarna head.

“And when was this, please?” Gabra asked.

“October 16, 1989,” Arlo said, like a man reciting the date of doomsday.

Gabra and Gideon exchanged glances. That made it just one week after the theft of the statuette at WV-29. Interconnected monkey business, all right.

“Proceed,” Gabra said.

Arlo proceeded. He had shouted at the man to stop. Instead, el-Hamid had begun to run. Arlo, calling upon reserves that came as a surprise to Gideon, and had very likely come as a surprise to Arlo, had chased after him. As el-Hamid rounded a bend his foot had caught on something and he had fallen hard, striking his head on the stone base of a defunct fountain.

When Arlo realized that he was dead he had gotten frightened. He had dragged the body twenty or thirty feet to the unused enclosure, thrown the Amarna head in after him, and left them there, shielded from nonexistent passersby by the stucco walls and the piles of junk, Arlo, whose eyes had been fixed on the floor as he spoke, looked up. “And that’s about it.”

Not by a long shot, Gideon thought.

Gabra didn’t think so either. “Why did you become frightened? If all was as you say, you did nothing wrong. Whyyou have said nothing all this long time? Why do you come forward now?”

“Oh, well,” said Arlo reluctantly, “that’s a long story.”

Gabra gestured with his cigarette. Time was no problem.

Arlo carefully laid his cigarette in an aluminum-foil ashtray and began. He spoke like a man who’d already been tried and condemned, hunched forward as if against the fetid damp of an Egyptian jail, with his hands squeezed flat between his knees.

It had started several weeks before the fatal night. There had been an outbreak of pilfering from the annex. It was an old and recurring problem at Horizon House. Nothing of significance; merely the sort of generic, everyday bits and pieces that might be palmed off to tourists for five or ten dollars. It had been going on in Egypt for millennia, and there always seemed to be more where they had come from. Still, Arlo said, one couldn’t help but hate to see them go off to Topeka and Fort Lauderdale to gather dust on knickknack shelves next to Toby jugs and commemorative spoons. He had grown suspicious of Abdul, who had started there at about the time the latest rash had begun, and who, as a janitor in the annex, had easy access to the collection.

He had reported his suspicions to Haddon and a trap had been laid. The bait had been snapped up and Abdul had been fired, but not until after a horrible scene during which the Egyptian had refused to accept Haddon’s decision and loudly accused Arlo, as Allah was his witness, of everything from offering him money to steal the objects to-and here Arlo flushed and lowered his voice-asking him to procure women and, er, ah, little boys, young children. It was too absurd for anyone to take any of it seriously, of course, and Haddon had called for a constable to send Abdul packing, but it had been terribly stressful for Arlo.

“May I have another cigarette?” he asked Gabra. His own, left untouched in the foil tray, was a cylinder of ash.

Gabra slid the open pack across to him along with the lighter.

“And you saw him next…?”

Arlo had some trouble getting the cigarette lit but finally managed. “I told you, that night at the back door of the annex, the night I-the night he fell.”

“Died,” said Gabra.

“Yes,” Arlo said after a moment. “Died. When that happened, I-J suppose I panicked. How could I tell anyone what happened? I was afraid it would look as if I killed him because of his revolting accusations. I was nearly hysterical- I felt-I heard his head crack, you see-all I wanted to do was get out of there, get him out of sight, so I-well, you know the rest.”

“No, not all,” Gabra said. “Since 1989 you can easily dispose of these bones. Why have you not done it sooner? Why do you leave them all this time until they are discovered, which must happen eventually?”

Ado’s shrug was half-shudder. “I couldn’t bring myself to touch him, or even to go back in there where he was. I think I made myself believe it had never really happened. I suppose I hoped somehow it would all never come to light.”

“Yet you come forward now,” Gabra said.

“Yes, because Dr. Oliver was working on it.” Arlo raised his eyes to Gideon in mournful tribute. “I knew it was only a question of time before you found out who it was.”

As compliments went, Gideon supposed, it wasn’t bad.

“What will happen to me now?” Arlo asked. “Am I under arrest?”

“Please, just to be patient,” said Gabra. “Dr. Oliver, I think you have things to ask?”

Indeed he did. He nodded his appreciation; not all cops were so collaborative. “Arlo, you’re sure that what he was making off with was an Amarna head?”

“Oh, yes, there was no question. Dr. Haddon described it perfectly on the ship the other night.”

“Yet you said nothing when the time was there,” Gabra said.

Arlo hung his head. “No.”

“When this all happened in 1989 you already knew about the theft at the site, didn’t you?” Gideon asked.

“Of the statuette? Yes, everybody knew about that.”

“And it didn’t occur to you that the head might go with the body? That the two thefts might be related?”

“Of course it occurred to me,” Arlo said with a brief spark of temper. “I told you: I was frightened. I just wanted to put it behind me, can’t you understand that?”

Yes, Gideon could understand that. Faced with the prospect of an Egyptian prison he too might have wanted to put it behind him.

“Arlo,” he said more gently, “let’s talk about last Sunday night when Ragheb found the skeleton, all right?”

Arlo nodded cautiously.

“After everybody went to bed, you went back to the enclosure, you painted the numbers on the bones-”

Arlo blinked, transparently surprised. His fingers almost stopped trembling. “What?”

“You painted-”

“I most certainly did not.”

Gideon blinked back. “You didn’t paint the numbers? You didn’t bury the original 4360? You didn’t take the head?”

“Absolutely not,” Arlo said, sounding offended for the first time. Accidentally killing a man was one thing; perpetrating a ludicrous escapade involving buried skeletons and faked numbers was clearly beneath his dignity.

“Well, who did?”

Arlo took a long, thoughtful pull on his cigarette. “Well now, how in the world would I know that?”

“The funny thing is,” Gideon said, holding up his hand to refuse the three-foot-long flexible smoking-tube the waiter was offering him, “I believe him.”

“As do I,” Gabra agreed, sighing with his first burbling puff on the narghile that had been placed on the tiled floor beside their table.

At the sergeant’s suggestion they had left Horizon House for a nearby outdoor cafe on Shari Mabaad after concluding their session with Arlo, who had almost wept with relief on being told by Gabra that he was not under arrest or in imminent danger of it, but was merely to keep himself available in Luxor for further questions, and to keep to himself what he had told them.

Arlo had done a cogent if not altogether coherent job of explaining himself. He had spent a terrible night after they had all gone out to look at the skeleton, he said, determining at dawn that he would confess and finally confront his fate that day. He had steeled himself to face Saleh and the wheels of Egyptian justice, and then he had been as flabbergasted as anyone else when the numbers were discovered on the bones the following morning. At first he had leaped at the idea that he had suffered some sort of hallucination four years earlier, that el-Hamid’s death had never happened, that the skeleton really was that of F4360.

But even Arlo, who clearly had some considerable propensity for deluding himself, couldn’t quite make himself believe that. In the end he had accepted the astonishing development as a kind of cosmic gift, like finding a winning lottery ticket among one’s dry-cleaning stubs. He had gratefully accepted his salvation, had asked no questions, had looked no gift-horses in the mouth. He had been delivered from evil, and he had had no intention of upsetting things by trying to find out who had done it or why.

No, it wasn’t very logical, but it did sound convincingly like Arlo.

“Somebody recognized that head for what it was,” Gideon mused aloud now, “then killed Haddon afterward because he’d seen it too. The question is: who?”

“ ‘When the cow stumbles,” “ Gabra said somberly, ” ’many knives come out.“ ”

This gloomy particle of Eastern wisdom hung in the air while the waiter set down their orders: mint tea for Gabra, Turkish coffee (“Here we call it Egyptian coffee,” Gabra had reproved him) for Gideon.

“Here’s what I think,” Gideon said. “I think the skeleton was painted to keep anyone from realizing it was one of the el-Hamids so that no one would make any connection to the theft of the statuette four years ago. That means that somebody besides Arlo knew all along that it was el-Hamid- either that, or knew enough to figure it out when the bones turned up. He also knew enough to make off with the head when he saw it.”

Gabra nodded, stirring sugar into his already sweetened glass of tea. “I too believe this to be so.”

“If it is,” Gideon said, “wouldn’t your next step be to find out if there’s been any new word of the head on the black market? Talk to the el-Hamids?”

“Yes, but to get information from these people is hard. Also, I think by now that this goes beyond the el-Hamids. It is too large a matter.”

Gideon leaned forward. “I have a friend here, a Dr. Boyajian. He thinks he might be able to learn something from people he knows in Luxor, people who might have contacts in the illegal antiquities market-”

But Gideon had pushed a little too far, a little too fast. “Your friend is too much interested, I think,” Gabra said curtly.

“I just thought-”

“This is a police matter, Doctor, a matter of…” He searched for the right words. “Of sensitivity, of discretion.”

Glumly, Gideon took a sip of the thick, syrupy coffee from its small, squat glass. Was he running into another police roadblock after all? “What’s so sensitive about it? Look, there have been two murders. There have been two thefts of antiquities that add up to a single piece of tremendous historical and monetary value. That piece properly belongs to Egypt, but if it’s not already out of the country by now it’s well on its way. I’d think-”

Gabra was shaking his head. “They will not talk to your friend, they will not talk to me. What we require is to have the help of a-a person with disguise, a-‘’ He fumbled for words again.

“An undercover agent?”

“Yes, an undercover agent, a person to pretend to be a rich buyer of antiquities in search of an Amarna statue.”

Gideon calmed down. “That’s a good idea.”

“We must have a person they do not know, a person who is familiar with Egyptian antiquities. We will have to speak with the antiquities authorities in Cairo. Unfortunately, this may take time-”

“How much time?”

Gabra hunched his shoulders while he used a pair of oversized tweezers to adjust the brazier of burning charcoal that kept the tobacco alight. “A week, no more.”

“A week? In a week there wouldn’t be-”

“Perhaps three days. If we are lucky, tomorrow, even.”

Tomorrow. Bukhra. Well, Gabra might be operating on Egyptian time, but Clifford Haddon’s killer wasn’t. “Sergeant, there’s a murderer at Horizon House. He-or she-is still there, but the more time we give him, the more chance he has-”

“Dr. Oliver, believe me, I have this many times before. To rush in without good preparation is bad. A proper undercover agent must first be found. Then he must be explained the situation, he must understand-”

“How about me?” Gideon said, startling himself.

Gabra appraised him for a good twenty seconds, through two pulls on the narghile. For a single, teetery moment Gideon thought he was going to go along with the idea, but then he shook his head. “This is not possible.”

“Why not?” Now that he’d adjusted to having made the suggestion in the first place, he was beginning to see some merit in it. The only part that daunted him was the prospect of telling Julie about it, but he’d work that out later. “They don’t know me. I know a fair amount about antiquities. I think I could do a pretty convincing imitation of a collector or a dealer who didn’t have too many scruples-”

“You don’t know to speak Arabic-”

“Why would a rich American collector speak Arabic?”

“You have no false identification.”

“You couldn’t have some made up for me?”

Again, there was a flash in Gabra’s eye, a brief, eager weighing of pros and cons, but again it dulled. “It is too dangerous,” he said with finality. “Already one American is killed. No. We will wait for a proper undercover agent. In the meantime, I have plenty of questions for your friends in Horizon House.”

“But-”

Gabra smiled and shook his head. “Go slowly, Doctor. You’re in Egypt. May I tell you an old Arabic saying?”

“Sure,” Gideon said with a sigh. Who knew, a few words of guidance from the Koran might be what he needed.

Gabra steepled his fingers and looked sagacious. “How does the camel fuck the ant?”

Or maybe not from the Koran. “How?” Gideon asked.

“With patience,” Gabra said.