Dead men’s hearts

Chapter Twenty-one

When Phil asked to be taken to the Shari el-Jihad the taxi driver had protested.

“No, you don’t want to go to that place,” he told them. “Not for tourist, only for Egyptian peoples.”

But he had unwillingly complied, and Gideon soon understood his initial reluctance. Luxor, like most of the Nile cities, was laid out in parallel bands of decreasing prosperity. Along the river the Corniche was a glittering filament of affluence, but with every block traveled inland the glitter diminished and the squalor increased. Their driver, muttering disapproval to the last, took them beyond the souks in which they’d grazed the evening before and let them out in a narrow, unpaved maze of shoddy two- and three-story tenements, recently built but already stained and crumbling. Bleating goats wandered in and out of doorways. Chickens and gaunt, listless dogs scratched in the rutted dirt or ate street garbage. Somewhere nearby a donkey bawled and was answered by a second. The smells were of animals, excrement, and rancid cooking oil.

They were only seven blocks from the opulent Comiche; they might have been on another planet.

Phil led Gideon another half a block, past the guarded, appraising glances of weary, thin men and the hidden eyes of women covered in black from head to toe like shrouded statues, who watched avidly as they passed. Or so it seemed; the thick, dark veils made it impossible to tell what was happening behind them.

At the first corner they turned left into a livelier area; a warren of souks something like the one they’d had their fuul and koshari in the night before, but a level or two downscale; a sort of blue-collar version, so to speak. Street vendors hawked oil-soaked fuul and pita bread (“Not recommended for the timid alimentary canal,” Phil said.), charcoal-grilled corn, and fantastically colored soft drinks. In a shop no more than five feet by eight, a man sat in a cracked leather barber chair having his hair cut under a single naked light bulb. Next door was a stall selling used television sets with chipped screens and missing knobs.

And next to that was their destination, a dingy, six-table cafe packed with men hunched over tea or coffee, arguing over Arabic newspapers, and smoking cigarettes or narghiles. Walking through the entryway produced an immediate reaction: conversations were suspended, heads were raised, every pair of eyes was on the exotically dressed strangers. The waiter, carrying a tray with two cups of coffee, stopped in mid-stride. Gideon’s skin prickled. In the fug of cheap tobacco smoke, the men, who had seemed merely weary a moment ago, suddenly looked like a pack of assassins. Even the two elderly, white-mustachioed constables in mildewed black uniforms, who had interrupted their backgammon game to watch, looked sinister.

Gideon glanced uncomfortably at Phil. “Are you sure we know what we’re doing?”

“Not really, no, now that you mention it. Oh, we’re supposed to go to a room in the back; that much I know.”

They crossed to the far wall under a continuing barrage of silent scrutiny. In passing, Phil said a few words to the waiter, who responded with a nod. Only when they pulled the rickety double-doors shut behind them did the hum of conversation resume.

They found themselves in a bleak, harshly lit room half as large as the outer one, with rough, colorless walls grimed by smoke and oily hands, and two inert, dust-covered ceiling fans. The only furnishings were a single round table and five chairs, with three waiting men seated on them. There were no greetings. One of the men, with a square-cut white skullcap that came down to his eyebrows and a curling black beard that rode up his sweating cheeks almost to his eyes and put Gideon’s prissy little affair to shame, motioned them into the vacant chairs and made a curt let’s-get-on-with-it gesture. He was Fouad el-Hamid, he said through Phil. The old man beside him was his uncle, Atef el-Hamid, and the young man was a cousin, Jalal el-Hamid.

Phil, smiling, launched into the opening speech that he and Gideon had worked out: he, Phil, was there to assist the famous antiquities dealer, John Smith of Cincinnati, who was interested in enlarging his Egyptian inventory. Mr. Smith was quite wealthy, and was willing to pay well for superior objects but did not care to have his time wasted with fakes or cheap trash. Naturally, he carried only a limited amount of money on his person, but if he were shown something that pleased him he could easily enough return to his hotel, where his traveler’s checks were kept.

Gideon used the time to study the el-Hamids. Judging from his interruptions and rambling, self-serving comments, Fouad, who puffed regularly at a narghile, was going to be the spokesman. Atef el-Hamid, seated next to him, was a wizened elder wearing a carelessly bound turban made from a ragged swatch of plaid cloth. An immense, tobacco-stained white mustache-it would have been a handlebar mustache if it had been waxed-hung on either side of his frail chin. The old man smoked with a vengeance. Mustache, fingertips, and lips looked as if they’d been cured. Periodically he would hold two lighted cigarettes, one in each hand: the one he was just finishing, and the one he was about to start.

Jalal, the third member of the party, was about twenty, slim and darkly handsome, with a loose, unpleasant smile and a greased hairstyle last seen in America in West Side Story. He was the only one who wasn’t smoking and the only one in Western dress-a shiny brown suit of eye-catching sleaziness, several sizes too tight and worn with a wilted white shirt and no tie. Once, when he noticed Gideon looking at him, he coolly, showily adjusted something that bulged behind his breast pocket.

As Phil wound up his presentation the waiter entered with coffee for everyone and a tray of flaky, sticky cakes.

Fouad nodded an indifferent thanks at Gideon and made a grab for the largest of the pastries. The other two just grabbed.

“It’s on you,” Phil explained, lifting his cup in salute. “Too kind.”

“My pleasure,” Gideon said, wincing as he sipped his own coffee, sugared as usual to the point of nausea for the American palate. Most American palates, at any rate; beside him Phil smacked his lips.

The preliminaries had been concluded. There was an air of anticipation around the table; time to get started. Gideon put down his cup, took a breath, and threw himself into the role of John Smith of Cincinnati, famous antiquities dealer.

“Do they have something to show me or don’t they?” he asked Phil gruffly. “I have other things to do with my time.”

Earlier they had agreed that they should say nothing in English that they didn’t want the el-Hamids to hear. No secrets, no asides, nothing that wasn’t in character. It was highly possible that they knew more English than they let on.

After Phil translated, the two older men conversed briefly and Atef el-Hamid reached under his chair, brought up a cane-and-rush basket that looked like something the infant Moses might have been found in, and set it on the table. It was full of crumpled wads of Arabic newspaper. The old man picked slowly among the wads, came to a decision, and removed the one he wanted. Squinting against the smoke from the cigarette between his brown teeth he pulled open the paper and took out a flat, crudely carved piece of wood a foot long and two or three inches wide, with a channel down the center and two circular depressions at one end. He gave it to Fouad, who passed it on to Gideon and watched him keenly while gobbling down another cake.

Test-time, Gideon thought. And he’d lucked out; he actually knew what it was.

“Scribe’s palette,” he said to Phil with weary disdain. “The groove was for holding the brush, these depressions were for the cakes of ink, one for red, one for black. Here, you can still see a little red. That would have been ground ocher. The black was carbon. The brush would be dipped in water and then rubbed on the cake of ink, like watercolor.”

Phil translated as he went along. The men’s quick glances at one another told him he had scored. It was a good thing too; he had used up everything he knew about scribal palettes.

“They want to know if you’re interested,” Phil said.

“In this piece of garbage? Be serious.”

That was part of the plan too. He would begin the bargaining in the time-honored fashion, disparaging whatever was offered first. Anything else would have undermined his credibility.

The old man gave no reaction. The palette remained on the table while he pulled open another wrapping of newspaper. A few copper implements spilled out onto the table. One was an adz with an open collar for the haft. The others Gideon wasn’t sure about; chisels, perhaps, or gouging tools.

The older men watched him guardedly. Jalal lay back in his chair, propped on the base of his spine, cocky and contemptuous.

“Want to make an offer?” Phil asked.

Gideon brushed the idea aside. “Please, don’t waste my time,” he said, with the closest thing to a sneer he could muster. “This is crap.”

This is fun, he thought.

Both older men started talking angrily at the same time. Phil translated what he could: “Old Kingdom… very rare…”

“What do I want with tools?” Gideon interrupted loudly, well into the swing of it. “What do they think I am, some damned carpenter?”

Fouad flashed an aggrieved look at him, grumbled something that Phil didn’t catch, and went into a huddled conference with his uncle.

“Do you want to buy or not?” Phil translated for them. “They don’t have time to waste either. Make them an offer or go play your games somewhere else. Perhaps you ought to offer something,” he added on his own.

“I haven’t seen anything to make an offer on yet. Don’t they understand my customers are interested in art!” He gestured at the objects on the table. “This looks like a garage sale.”

Apparently Phil came up with an understandable translation. Fouad and Atef went into another huddle. The old man pushed his drooping turban back from his eyes, scratched his nose, and reached judiciously into the basket, hesitating first over one package, then another.

“I don’t have all night,” Gideon said abruptly. “Tell them to lay out what they have.”

This created some protest-it was not the customary way-but in the end, the contents of the basket were laid out over the table. In addition to what had come before, there was a small ivory figurine of a woman, primitively carved and probably Predynastic, a set of miniature copper vessels and utensils, some tiny pots and basins that he took to be cosmetics containers, and a small blue and yellow vase that had been cracked and mended.

Everyone looked at him expectantly, even the prodigiously bored young Jalal. The old man had two cigarettes in his hands again, forgetting for the moment to smoke either one.

Gideon picked up the vase and tried to look as if he knew what he was doing. He scratched it gently with his fingernail, he pursed his lips, he frowned and stroked his jaw, not helping his case any when he encountered the furry thing on his chin and almost jumped out of his chair.

“This vase, where’s it from?” he asked when he settled down again, thinking it sounded like the right kind of question.

Phil listened to their answer. “They don’t tell where they find anything, but they say it’s definitely from the time of Thutmose III.”

“I don’t think so,” Gideon said as if he knew what he was talking about. “I think it’s probably a modern forgery.”

This produced an indignant explosion from Fouad, which Phil translated with fine gusto, slipping into first-person for the full effect.

“ ‘A forgery, you say? A forgery?” “ Phil’s hands sprang ceilingward in emulation of the Arab’s. ” ’How can you say a thing like that? The man who found it, who personally found it where it had lain three thousand years, is my own brother-in-law. Would my brother-in-law lie to me? Would we lie to you?“ ”

Gideon was searching for a firm but politic answer when Jalal spoke his first words in a husky, confident voice. Phil listened soberly.

“He says you’re wrong, these aren’t fakes, but, yes, they’re run-of-the-mill, not high-quality. But he can show you much better things, not the kind of things you carry through the streets in a basket. If their business with you here is satisfactory, maybe he’ll show you some finer things, more interesting things.”

The old man remonstrated shrilly with the boy but was cut off by a sharp response that left him muttering. Gideon realized with surprise that if anybody was in charge, it was Jalal, half Fouad’s age and a quarter Atef’s. The boy continued to speak his piece, looking directly at Gideon.

“He wants to know what you’re interested in,” Phil said.

So. It was time to begin closing in on what they’d come for. Gideon put down the vase. “I have a number of clients who have asked me to look for Amarna Period art for them.”

Jalal smirked. “Everybody wants Amarna art,” Phil translated when he’d spoken.

“Everybody can’t pay what I can pay. I represent some very wealthy clients. And I pay in American dollars. I’m particularly interested in statuary,” he added casually.

Jalal continued to appraise him for several seconds after Phil interpreted, then uttered a few words.

“It’s possible,” Phil translated, “but afterward. First, this.” He lifted an eyebrow toward Gideon. “I, ah, think this might be a propitious time to make an offer.”

Gideon thought so too. He leaned forward to pick up the vase again. “Let’s start with this. I might be able to find someone foolish enough to buy it. Shall we say, oh…”

Oh, what? He was completely in the dark. In this room, with these humble people, it was worth perhaps a fiftieth, maybe only a hundredth, of what it might sell for in the legitimate or pseudo-legitimate art market, but as to what that was, he didn’t have a clue.

He took a stab. “… oh, fifty dollars.”

The two older men went into a whispered conference, sibilant and heated. Fouad excitedly ticked off points on his fingers while his elder emitted streams of smoke, shook his head, and rapped the table. Jalal remained above it all with an apathetic, slack-lipped smile. After a while he looked at his watch-fake gold band, fake Rolex facegot up, and sauntered out, but not before a gangsterly, showy shrug of his left shoulder and another pat of his breast pocket to adjust what Gideon hoped was a fake gun in a fake holster.

It took a few minutes more before the other two came to a conclusion. The old man shoved his turban out of his eyes again, made his statement, and folded his arms.

“They say it’s out of the question,” Phil said. “They will accept one hundred and fifty, which they say is a very great bargain when you consider-”

“Okay,” Gideon said. The men looked stunned. Phil looked a little pained too; apparently he’d hoped to get out of this with his fifty dollars at least partly intact.

Gideon put the money on the table, bill by bill, before the Egyptians, who were patently too astonished at their good fortune to speak. He knew well enough that this wasn’t the way to bargain in the Arab world, but he was anxious to finish up. If they were going to learn anything about the Amarna head, he had concluded by now, it was going to be through Jalal. And he had the impression that the young man had left only temporarily, to talk to somebody or to make a telephone call, that he would be back with something to say, that progress might yet be made this night.

The men eagerly scooped up the bills, chattering away at Phil to tell the honored gentleman from Cincinnati that they had many more such beautiful items for sale, at equally favorable prices, and if the honored gentleman Jalal eased his way back through the double doors and cut them off with a word. They looked at each other, bobbed their farewells, and hurried toward the exit.

“They’re forgetting their things,” Gideon said. “All I bought was the vase.”

“No, you bought everything,” Phil said. “The basket too.”

Gideon was flabbergasted. “For $150? The figurine alone must be-”

The young man cut in. Phil, instead of translating, got into an exchange with him.

“He knows someone who has Amarna things to sell,” Phil said. He wants to take you to meet him. It’s a man called Ali Hassan. Apparently he’s a dealer, an exporter. According to our young friend, anything decent that comes out of Luxor illegally goes through his hands.“

Bingo. “Terrific, what are we waiting for?”

“No, just you. I’m not invited.” Phil’s face had tightened. He didn’t like the turn of events.

Gideon wasn’t overjoyed either. “Just me? How am I supposed to communicate? I need someone who speaks English.”

“Me, I speak English,” Jalal said, not altogether surprising Gideon. “Let’s go.”

Gideon exchanged a worried look with Phil. He understood what Phil had been trying to tell him a moment ago. A dealer, an exporter-one of the vicious ones, in other words; one of the dangerous ones. But was there really anything to worry about? Why should this Ali Hassan, regardless of how vicious, have any reason to do him harm? Hassan’s business was buying and selling illegal antiquities. And Gideon was John Smith, a rich American not overly burdened by ethical considerations who was looking for just the kind of things Hassan had to sell. Hassan would naturally be a little wary of a new face, but he would be licking his chops over profits to come, not planning assassination.

Or so he hoped.

“Just a minute,” Gideon said. “I have to talk with my associate-privately, if that’s all right with you.” Circumstances had changed on them. Plan A, so airily devised an hour ago, was no longer in effect and there wasn’t any plan B.

“No talk,” Jalal said sharply. “We go now, this minute, or don’t go.”

He was on edge too. He didn’t quite trust them, and Gideon thought he meant what he said.

Gideon looked at Phil, who shrugged. Gideon shrugged too. “All right.”

“Get in touch with me as soon as you get back,” Phil said.

“No talk,” Jalal snapped.

The boy pulled a folded turban cloth from an inside pocket and shook it out. “For to go over you eyes. Sit down.”

“All right,” Gideon said again. Actually, this was a heartening development. If they didn’t want him to know where he was going, at least that meant that they expected him to leave alive. Not that there was any reason, he repeated to himself, that they might want him otherwise.

“Wait a minute,” he said as Jalal began to wind the cloth around his eyes. “If you take me through the caf6 blindfolded everybody’s going to see it.”

“They see before,” the boy said off-handedly.