Dead Men's Hearts (6 page)

“No, it doesn’t seem to be,” TJ said.

“Could someone have taken it?”

“Taken it?” TJ said. “You mean,
taken
it? Between then and now?”

“I mean—never mind.” He continued to worry his lip. “Now that I think of it, I suppose it could have been an illusion caused by the flashlight beams. All those moving shadows…”

“I can ask the others if they saw it.”

“Yes, do. No, don’t. We’ll keep this between ourselves. I shouldn’t want anyone to think…”He cleared his throat and drew himself up, recovering some of his firmness. “And need I point out that nothing about this outlandish affair need be repeated to our visitors? There is no reason in the world for Bruno Gustafson or anyone else connected with the foundation to know anything about—”

“Urn,” said Tiffany. She was trying to decide how—or whether—to break it to Haddon that Bruno already knew about the finding of the skeleton. He and Bea had provided the pizza and joined in its eating the previous night, and the discovery in the enclosure had naturally become the main topic of conversation once she, Arlo, and Jerry had arrived.

“Urn,” she said again. “There’s a slight problem—”

“Hi!” Bruno himself said brightly, appearing magically at the entry to the enclosure. “What’s going on in here?”

Haddon blinked and walked toward him, blocking his view. “Why, good morning, my dear Mr. Gustafson. I understood that you were flying to Abu Simbel today.”

“Nope, just Bea. I’ve been there before and it’s just—Hey, looka here—TJ, is that the skull you were talking about?”

Haddon glowered murderously at her.

TJ cleared her throat. “Uh, well, actually, Mr. Gustafson, it’s, uh—”

Haddon flung up his hands. “Never mind!” he shouted skyward. “We at Horizon House have no secrets. We are an open book. Tell all, tell all!” And he stamped off, his tuft of beard stiffly leading the way.

A momentarily crestfallen Bruno watched him go. “What did I say?”

TJ smiled. “Nothing, he’s been under a little strain, that’s all. It’s nothing personal.”

“Glad to hear it. Hope he’s okay.” He looked happily down at the skull. “So tell me, what’s the story?”

“It’s a long one, Mr. Gustafson,” TJ said.

Chapter Six

Gideon was not at his most scintillating. He was, in fact, having trouble keeping awake. It had been a long couple of days.

He and Julie had left Port Angeles before dawn the previous morning, starting with a three-hour trip by car and ferry to the airport. Then a long wait at SeaTac, followed by sixteen grubby hours and ten increasingly debilitating time-zone changes to Cairo International Airport. This was followed by a hair-whitening forty-five-minute taxi ride into the city to clear up a problem with their visas, and then back to the airport by means of a taxi journey that was marginally less bloodcurdling than the first one (or were they already getting used to it?). They’d missed their flight to Luxor and had had to wait for two hours in the grungy, noisy airport, fidgety and disoriented, until the next one left.

They had arrived at Horizon House in time for a shower, a dazed tour of the facility and a round of introductions, followed by cocktails that they hardly needed but accepted anyway, and a heavy “roast beef” dinner that Gideon was fairly certain had been water buffalo, not that his taste buds were at their most discriminating.

Afterward, as he did most evenings, Haddon had invited a few people to his study for after-dinner drinks and a little anthropological chitchat. Julie had wisely declined, going off to bed instead, but Gideon had accepted for courtesy’s sake. Grainy-eyed and dopey, he was doing his best to participate, but it was a losing battle. And the subject matter wasn’t helping things. Since halfway through dinner they had been mired in a lexicological discussion, or rather a lexicological lecture by Clifford Haddon, on the vagaries of Middle Egyptian script.

But then Clifford Haddon was famously more at home in the remote past than in the present. Gideon had never met him before, but had heard it said of him that while teaching in the classics department at Yale in the 1950s, he would stand at the blackboard drawing wonderfully detailed street maps of ancient Alexandria, or Herculaneum, or fifth-century Athens (“This was where Socrates lived, this would have been the house of Alcibiades…”) but would have to rely on the kindness of colleagues to drive him to and from campus because he could never get the hang of downtown New Haven. In the same way, he knew most of the many versions and derivatives of hieroglyphic script, along with ancient Greek, Latin, Sumerian, and Coptic—but, even after eighteen years in Egypt, had never bothered learning more than a few catchphrases of modern Arabic.

Gideon had found the stories amusing, but the man in the flesh considerably less so. And Middle Egyptian was heavy going, particularly on thirty hours without sleep.

“And so, despite the predilections of contemporary scholarship,” Haddon was saying, brandy in hand, his slight body at ease in the old leather chair, “I continue to adhere to my original view that the splitting of the determined infinitive in Middle Egyptian was far more widespread than is commonly understood, even today.” He had been in full pedantic flight for some time.

“Fascinating,” Gideon said, not above borrowing a leaf from Rupert LeMoyne’s book in a time of need.

Still, he had to admit that there was a certain fusty charm to Haddon’s speech, a Victorian cast that went well with their surroundings. They were in Haddon’s two-story study, a big, headmasterish room straight out of
Goodbye, Mr. Chips
and dating back to the days of Cordell Lambert, the first director of what was then known as the American Institute of Egyptian Studies. Along one wall was a dark sideboard with cut-crystal flasks and glasses from which Haddon had offered port and cognac (no takers except Haddon himself and Bruno Gustafson). Next to it was a black iron staircase that spiraled up to the narrow, railed mezzanine that gave access to the room’s chief glory, the Lambert Egyptological Library, housed in section after section of finely made, glass-fronted cabinetry.

In the main part of the room, on a threadbare rug over a red tile floor, were a chunky Victorian two-seater and two worn, deeply buttoned, burgundy leather armchairs arranged to face a formidable, homely old desk with scalloped edges and a glass plate on top.

In books on the history of Egyptology there was usually an old photograph of a stiffly posed Cordell Lambert, chin in hand, sitting at this very desk, in this very room—only the walls were different; flowered wallpaper instead of today’s off-white paint—and it was behind the same desk that the current director, Clifford Haddon, now sat so comfortably. Gideon was in one of the armchairs, Bruno Gustafson was in the other (Bea had gone off to bed), and, side by side on the uncomfortable-looking two-seater were Tiffany Jane (“Call me TJ. Or else.”) Baroff, Horizon’s assistant director and supervisor of field activities, and Arlo Gerber, the head of epigraphy.

TJ Baroff was an outspoken, strapping woman in her mid-thirties, leggy and casual. When they’d arrived she’d been wearing wrinkled tan shorts, an oversized man’s work shirt, and dirty Converses. Now, in a clean T-shirt and wraparound skirt, barelegged and sandaled, she still looked like what she was: a field archaeologist at her happiest grubbing in the dirt for a crumbling fragment of a clay cooking pot. Her roughly pulled-back hair was sun-streaked, her arms and legs chapped and sunburnt, her knees scuffed.

Gideon had liked her right off. During dinner she had helped keep his chin from settling into his soup with a hearty denunciation of the fossilized, old-style Egyptologists—if she included Haddon she didn’t say so—who had ruled Egyptology for so long and were more like dilettantish linguists and classicists than real anthropologists, more interested in quibbling over verb-form distinctions and royal family trees than in using the techniques of modern archaeology to reconstruct the lives and institutions of the ancient Egyptian people. Not her; she’d ten times rather discover a peasant’s hut full of everyday tools and utensils that said something about real, daily life than be the one to find the legendary sun temple of Nefertiti.

Gideon felt the same way and said so.

Arlo Gerber, who had sat next to Gideon at dinner, was another sort, a defeated, indoorsy kind of man with an ashy pallor that was common enough in Seattle, but must have been no mean trick to maintain living year-round in Luxor. In his early forties, he could hardly be called a fossil yet, but it wasn’t going to take long. Hunched, narrow-shouldered, and restrained—well, stuffy—with graying temples and a sorry little cat’s-whiskers mustache, Arlo was a classically trained Egyptologist whose job it was to supervise the intricate, exacting process of Horizon’s epigraphic unit. There, weathered and broken stone texts and scenes were reconstructed, interpreted, and recorded through a complex technique involving photography, line drawings, blueprints, and—above all—the scholarship of men like Arlo.

To be honest, five years of it was enough, he had told Gideon. But what he
was
excited about, and he knew Gideon would be interested in this, was the book he was working on,
Personal Ornamentation from the Time of Akhenaten.
Saying the title did for him what saying “Shazam” did for Billy Batson. Behind that modest brow, mental muscles of steel had suddenly flexed and rippled. His pale eyes had gleamed. He had pulled his chair a few inches closer to Gideon’s, the better to talk about it. Wasn’t it extraordinary how little had been done on Amarna Period jewelry? There was some material in Aldred, of course, but that was about it as far as anything of breadth and substance went. Wasn’t it high time that this sad situation was rectified?

Gideon, working hard to keep his chin out of the mashed potatoes, had said that it certainly was.

That had been an hour ago. Now he glanced up at the pendulum clock on the wall. Nine-forty. They’d been in Had-don’s study only fifteen minutes. He would give it another twenty to be polite, and then call it quits. Any more than that and they’d have to carry him to his room.

Haddon was sipping brandy and staring at the ceiling, apparently gathering further thoughts on the determined infinitive in Middle Egyptian.

“Any promising fieldwork going on these days, TJ?” Gideon asked, in hopes of heading him off.

TJ came out of her own reverie. “What? Well, yes, as a matter of fact. We’re in our fifth season of a dig right across the river, in the Western Valley. It’s a workers’ community— something like Deir el-Medinah, but not as big. Lambert originally excavated most of it in the 1920s, but in those days they didn’t have the techniques to do the kind of job we can do today, and we’re doing it right this time. We’re learning a lot about New Kingdom daily life—ordinary people, I mean, not the royal court.”

“It sounds interesting,” Gideon said. “Maybe I could get out to see it sometime this week?”

TJ’s teeth flashed. “Sure! Just tell me when—”

“You know,” Haddon said airily, his eyes still on the ceiling, his hands clasped behind his neck, “I was just thinking: these questions pertaining to the split infinitive bring naturally to mind the controversy over the supposed use of the independent pronoun to express a relation of possession. In that matter, I must respectfully take issue with Gardiner’s views. I believe I can do so persuasively. Ahem.”

Gideon steeled himself, but the courageous Bruno took advantage of Haddon’s cogitative pause to change the subject.

“Say, did you ever find out any more about those bones?” he asked the director.

Gideon perked up a little. Bones?

Haddon turned abruptly snappish. “There was nothing to find out. It’s all been taken care of with no harm done.”

“What do you mean, nothing to find out? What about what it was doing there?”

“Honestly, Mr. Gustafson, it was no more than—”

“Seemed to me like something for the Skeleton Detective,” the impervious Bruno continued. He looked toward Gideon with a jocular wiggle of the eyebrows. “The Case of the Body in the Dustbin.”

Haddon smiled thinly. “I doubt very much if it would hold Dr. Oliver’s interest.”

He was wrong, of course. Bones could always hold his interest. And compared to Middle Egyptian split infinitives, they were spellbinding. “Actually—” he began.

“And what about that head?” Bruno asked. “I heard—”

Haddon yawned delicately, tapping his mouth with his fingers. “I do beg your pardon,” he said. “Obviously, it’s past my bedtime. And Dr. Oliver must be positively exhausted. How thoughtless of me to keep you up. Tomorrow’s another day.”

After that there wasn’t much to say other than good night.

The living quarters at Horizon House—twelve bunk-bed cubicles for graduate students and seasonal staff, eleven roomier but no less Spartan rooms for permanent staff and visitors, and the director’s two-room apartment—all opened off the handsome courtyard-patio with its arched portico, its fig and mango trees, and its tinkling, tiled Moorish fountain. Gideon and Julie’s room was in the north wing where the accommodations for visiting VIPs were located along with two rooms for married staff. Bruno, who was a visiting VIP if there ever was one, had chosen instead to stay at the New Winter Palace Hotel (or rather Bea had; if she was going to go traipsing around the Third World, she’d declared, she was damn well going to do it first-class). He headed for the front gate of the compound, where the guard would call him a taxi, leaving Gideon, TJ, and a yawning Arlo to walk across the tiled patio to their quarters.

Jerry Baroff, whom Gideon had met at dinner, was sprawled in one of the rattan garden chairs in the dark, feet up on a low table and placidly smoking his pipe.

“Hi,” he said, “how’d the seminar on Middle Egyptian go?”

Gideon smiled. “You mean the subject’s always the same?”

“Uh-uh, lucky guess. Sometimes it’s the Co-regency. I don’t know, tonight just felt like Middle Egyptian.” He pointed the bit of his pipe at them. “Verb forms, am I right?”

“Right on,” TJ said, laughing. “Right up until Bruno brought up the bones, and then it was ‘Good night, ladies.” “