Dead men’s hearts

Chapter Two

Clifford Haddon paused in mid-sentence, placed his glass of Scotch on the side table, and rose to shut the windows behind him. Even with them closed, the din was maddening. Eighteen years in Egypt and he had yet to get used to the unremitting noise. When he’d first started at Horizon House, the nights had been almost tolerable, but ever since some public-relations wunderkind had come up with those unspeakable sound-and-light shows at Karnak and Luxor Temple- one three-quarters of a mile north of Horizon House, the other three-quarters of a mile south-the racket along the Corniche was unending from morning till midnight. If you asked him, Luxor’s traffic was as deafening as Cairo’s and getting worse all the time.

He snorted. The Egyptian view of automobile horns, as conveniently fatalistic as the Egyptian view of everything else, was that they were meant to be used, or else why have them? And use them they did, with a vengeance. No polite little bip-bips on the streets of Luxor or Cairo or Alexandria. Six endless, excruciating seconds-that was the mean time any individual horn blared; he knew because he had taken the time to establish it empirically. They blew their precious horns on any pretext whatever: to let off steam, to express high spirits, to impress other drivers, to intimidate those pedestrians foolish or desperate enough to try make it from one curb to the other, and, he had no doubt, to satisfy the universal desire to add their two cents to the general pandemonium lest Allah not mark their presence.

He returned to his chair and resumed his seat. “Have you ever thought,” he mused to the three people seated in armchairs near the fireless fireplace in the austere, vaguely baronial room known as the gallery, “what a wonderful country Egypt would be-”

“-if not for the Egyptians,” said one of them, a blonde woman of thirty-five with one bare leg draped over the arm of her chair.

Haddon scowled, having remembered too late that Tiffany Baroff had been at his side a few days before, when he had produced this witticism while showing a group of visiting Austrian scholars over the grounds.

“Exactly,” he said grumpily as he resumed his seat, averting his eyes from the vulgarly swinging leg, on the knee of which he had perceived one of the Donald Duck plastic strips that she used to cover her frequent scrapes and scratches. When had archaeologists begun looking like overgrown tomboys?

And Tiffany, was that a name for an archaeologist? She herself preferred TJ, but to his mind that was more preposterous still. Tiffany was her name, such as it was, and as far as he was concerned, they were both stuck with it.

Not that she looked like a Tiffany. Now Helga, that would suit her, or Edwina. Big-boned, knobby-kneed, impertinent, and relentlessly, aggravatingly healthy, she was given to baggy tan shorts, baggy men’s work shirts (worn with the tails out), and ankle-top sneakers of a startlingly pneumatic appearance. All in all, she looked more like a forward on a ladies’ field hockey team than the supervisor of field activities for one of the world’s oldest Egyptological institutions. And not only the supervisor of field activities, but his chief assistant. And not only that, but the likely heir to the directorship when he himself was forced to step down the following year on reaching seventy.

Over his dead body. No grubbing field archaeologist who couldn’t tell the difference between demotic script and abnormal hieratic was going to run Horizon House if he had anything to say about it. Certainly not one named Tiffany, with Donald Duck patches on her knees.

“Shall we get down to business?” he said. He stroked his crisp, silvery beard. “It seems we’re going to have to adjust our schedule for the next few days.”

Tiffany’s tanned leg stopped swinging. She watched him warily. On her right, Arlo Gerber, head of the epigraphic unit, had a vaguely apprehensive look in his eyes, but was there really anything extraordinary about that? On Tiffany’s other side, Jerry Baroff, librarian and registrar (and Tiffany’s much-to-be-pitied husband), puffed his pipe and also looked the way he always looked, which was to say elsewhere.

“As you know,” Dr. Haddon went on, “we poor scholars are at the mercy of our old friend Forrest Freeman, the Orson Welles of cinema archeologique, who has been encumbering our normally simple and unassuming lives for several days now, in connection with the making of a manifestly unnecessary, exasperatingly time-consuming, and extraordinarily expensive documentary film-not, of course, that the expenses involved would be of any concern to its sponsors, the estimable Beatrice and Bruno, among us at present for their annual laying on of hands and imperial-”

He paused. “Yes, Arlo?”

“Actually, they’re not making a film. It’s a videotape.”

“Oh, yes? How interesting.”

“I only meant that it’s not as expensive as making a film.”

“Thank you. Will all please note that the record has been set straight.”

Beneath Arlo’s absurd little mustache his mouth quivered and set. He examined his rather grubby fingernails. Dr. Haddon recognized the all-too-familiar signs of resentment and offended dignity. A man of exquisite sensibilities, Arlo Gerber.

“May I continue now?” Dr. Haddon said. “I met with Forrest for some time this afternoon to discuss changes in our schedule. It seems they have run into a conflict with the visa authorities, and must cut their time with us by several days. You can readily imagine how disconsolate I was at this news.

“Now: our original schedule called for two more days here at Horizon House, to be followed by a flight to el-Amarna, whence we were to embark on a luxurious week-long cruise back up the Nile to Luxor-a Nile cruise, heaven help us!- stopping at various and sundry sites recalling the many Horizon House triumphs of yesteryear. Then we were to conclude with another five days of filming-I beg your pardon, Arlo, of videotaping -in and around Horizon House.”‘

He frowned at Tiffany, whose leg had begun its impatient and recriminatory oscillations again. What an unfailingly irritating woman she was. Really, it wasn’t as if he didn’t know perfectly well that he was repeating something they had already heard. But with this group, one couldn’t repeat things too many times. Say it often enough, and anything was possible. Tiffany might actually stop arguing, Arlo might say something pertinent, and Jerry might even be caught at a rare moment when he was inadvertently paying attention to what was going on around him.

Not very likely, any of it, but one had to try.

“And now there’s going to be a change?” Jerry asked.

Well, there you were.

“Yes, Jerry. In order to meet the new time constraints el-Amarna has been eliminated from the schedule. We will start the cruise at Abydos instead, saving several days. And our departure from Horizon House will now be the day after tomorrow, one day after we are joined by Gideon Oliver, that well-known paragon of scientific decorum and reserve. That will eliminate a day here at Horizon House, and one additional day will be pruned after we return. Naturally, certain activities will have to be abbreviated or eliminated. For one thing, Jerry, they obviously can no longer spend an entire morning in the library. I hope two hours will be sufficient.”

Jerry’s shoulders lifted in a vague but acquiescent shrug. “Sure, I guess so. I don’t even know what I can tell them that’ll take two hours.”

“Very good. And Arlo? Three hours in your section?”

Arlo nodded in a removed sort of way, as if these details were beneath him. Still piqued, the man was. “Very well, if that’s all that can be spared.”

“Very good. And I fear we had better eliminate the visit to WV-29 entirely, inasmuch-”

“Oh, now, wait a minute-” Tiffany’s leg was snatched gawkily back over the arm of the chair. Her dirty, size-ten sneaker swept across the low table in front of her, knocking Jerry’s pipe out of the ashtray and making him sit up with a start, alert if only for the moment.

Tiffany leaned forward, staring grimly at Haddon. “I don’t believe this.”

Excessive though it was, this response did not surprise him. WV-29 was archaeological shorthand for Western Valley 29, the twenty-ninth site to be located in the arid, dismal, little-visited side-canyon of the Valley of the Kings just across the Nile. It was also Tiffany’s pet project, now in its fifth season of excavation, and she had entertained fond hopes of showing it off for posterity.

“Believe me, my dear,” Dr. Haddon said, “I’m more distressed about this than you are. But think about the time involved. A ferry across the river, a van to the valley floor, a fifty-foot scramble up the hillside with all that camera equipment-Forrest felt-”

“Balls, Forrest doesn’t have anything to do with it,” Tiffany said. “It’s you. You just don’t give a damn whether the site’s included or not.”

Dr. Haddon considered pouring himself a bit more Scotch, but decided against it despite the provocation. He knew from sad experience that more than three fingers, when combined with the pills he now took to battle the various decrepitudes of age, would make him a sorry man in the morning.

With some effort, he dredged up a kindly smile for her. “Not so, my dear. The fact of the matter is, I argued mightily with Forrest, suggesting that Horizon House be the documentary’s sole location, thereby eliminating the cruising time in its entirety. Unfortunately, the masterful Forrest exerted his contractual-”

“Are you cutting the time they’re going to spend on your Middle Egyptian generative grammar paradigm?”

“That,” he said crisply, “was never scheduled to take more than two hours in the first place.”

“So they’re getting two hours of syntactic analysis that nobody has given a damn about since 1932,” Tiffany blurted, “but you’re not going to let them near our one and only working excavation?”

Now he was annoyed. “Excavation of what?” he said testily. “Tell us, just what is there to see up there? What is this wondrous WV-29 that consumes so much of our resources? The long-lost royal tomb of Queen Tiy? Of Akhenaten himself?” Damn it all, there she’d gone and made him lose his temper.

“No,” she said, her face settling into the irritating sulk that heralded one of her little lectures. “It’s not a long-lost royal anything. It was a common, everyday workers’ village with absolutely nothing in it of royal interest. Just ordinary, average people not worth bothering about.”

He eyed the Scotch bottle once more: Teacher’s Highland Cream, purchased at extortionate cost, but well worth it when compared to the barbaric Egyptian spirits. Perhaps under the circumstances he could allow himself the merest driblet more. He poured, sipped, and felt better for it.

“My dear Tiffany, I’m quite aware-”

“The purpose of modern Egyptological research,” she went on automatically-and why wouldn’t it be automatic, considering the regularity with which she trotted out this tiresome and misinformed harangue?-“isn’t to uncover more royal burials, more royal stelae, it’s to reconstruct the broader-”

“-the broader social and cultural institutions of ancient Egypt,” Dr. Haddon supplied. Tit for tat.

“-and-” Tiffany faltered momentarily, but only momentarily. “Yes, that’s right, but as long as we continue to pay more attention to interpreting, and re-interpreting, and re-re-interpreting the goddamn objects that come out of the ground than we do to the real knowledge that comes from careful stratigraphic excavation-”

“Yes, yes, Tiffany, I know, but time had to be found somewhere. Forrest is in complete accord with the decision, and I really don’t see what I can be expected to do about it.”

Apparently, neither did she. She made a disgusted motion with her hand and folded her arms. “The hell with it,” she muttered and subsided, defeated.

Dr. Haddon cleared his throat. “Now, if no one has further objections, I should like to discuss a few related matters to make sure there is no misunderstanding.” He paused. “Are there any objections?”

Jerry Baroff dipped his chin and passed the back of his hand over his mouth to hide a yawn. Tiffany stared morosely at the floor, no doubt framing the rebuttals and counterstatements she wished she’d made. Arlo Gerber, turtlelike and opaque, offered a convincing impression of a man giving his attention to some unpleasant digestive happening. Whether from malice or constitutional deficiency, Dr. Haddon’s audience appeared to have sunk into impenetrability.

Abruptly, Dr. Haddon suffered one of his increasingly frequent sinkings of the heart. The thought of ending his long career-he who had worked alongside Aldred and James- with this sorry crew as his companions in the pursuit of knowledge weighed heavily on his aging shoulders. Just look at them. What was going on in those closed and brutish minds?

Was anything?