Dead Men's Hearts (8 page)

Her husband looked leery. “Do I want to know this?”

“Oh, it’s nothing bad. It just makes me wonder about his—well, he asked me what happened to the head that was there last night.”

Jerry frowned. “The what?”

“In the enclosure. He seems to think he saw a yellow jasper head in there, near the bones, or maybe it was quartzite. Look, keep this to yourselves, will you? I wasn’t supposed to talk about it. Not that it matters. Bruno already knows.”

Jerry stood leaning on the railing, silent and contemplative, pulling on his pipe.

“You mean he said it was there last night, but not this morning?” Gideon asked.

“Right. And it worried me, because—look, Gideon, this is not for public consumption either, but he got a little tiddly last night, which he tends to do most nights, no big deal, never during working hours, but this is the first time that he ever—well, hallucinated, I guess you’d have to call it. He even thought he remembered pointing it out.”

“He did,” Jerry said quietly.

TJ swung to face him. “Did what?”

“Point it out.”

She stared at him. “Jerry, I was right there. If he—”

“He didn’t say it was a head. He said… I don’t remember his exact words… he was flashing his light around, and he said, ”What’s that piece over there,“ or, ”See that thing over there,“ or something like that. Don’t you remember?”

“No!”

“Well,” Jerry said, “there was a lot of excitement, you were arguing with him—”

“What was he pointing at? How do you know it was a head? Did you actually see anything?”

“No, I wasn’t really paying attention. But maybe Ragheb saw it, or Ario.”

TJ shook her head. “No. I asked them, even though Dr. H told me not to.”

“Huh? Why would he tell you not to?”

“I think he thinks he was dreaming himself.” She hunched her shoulders. “He was pretty well potted, Jerry.”

“Yeah, he was that.” Jerry banged his pipe on his palm to knock out the dottle, pulled the pipe apart, and blew wetly through the stem. “Tiff,” he said slowly, “you don’t suppose that maybe there
was
something, and Ragheb came back during the night, and, well…”

“Stole it?” TJ said indignantly. “Of course not. And even if he’d wanted to, all he had to do was take it in the first place, before he ever came in to call us.”

“Maybe he didn’t see it until Dr. H pointed it out.”

“Jerry, I can’t believe you’re saying this. How can you believe Ragheb is a liar and a thief? He’s been here almost as long as we have, he’s the nicest, gentlest—”

“I’m just trying to look at all the angles, Tiff,” Jerry said peaceably. “Why would Dr. H imagine he saw a quartzite head?”

“Why would Ragheb steal it?” TJ countered.

They turned to Gideon as if they expected him to resolve the dispute, but Gideon had reached the end of his rope. He was beyond overtiredness now, finally ready for sleep, wondering only where he was going to find the energy to climb the stairs to the room. He tried unsuccessfully to smother a prodigious yawn.

TJ laughed. “Let’s get this poor guy upstairs before he collapses on us. He’s got a long day tomorrow; six-bit tour in the morning, and then off to Amarna in the afternoon.”

“Amarna?” Gideon said fuzzily. “I thought that wasn’t in the schedule anymore.”

“It wasn’t, but Forrest decided that artistic integrity demanded its inclusion after all. Even if we have to rush like hell through everything else.”

Gideon yawned again. “Good. I’d hate to miss it.”

“We really ought to get up,” Julie said.

“Mm,” replied Gideon.

Neither of them stirred. After a while Gideon gently brushed the backs of his fingers over her cheek, pleased as always by the softness of her skin, pleased as always with himself for having her beside him morning after morning, night after night.

“I mean,” said Julie, “we can’t very well lie in bed all day like a couple of slugs. Not that this wasn’t a nice way to start the day.”

Gideon smiled. “I’d hardly say like a couple of slugs.”

“No,” she said, laughing. She turned on her side to face him, cradling his hand between her cheek and the pillow. Her eyes, glossy and ink-black, were a foot from his. “But we’re going to have to get going sometime. I hear they have a full day planned for us.”

“Whatever it is, it’s going to be downhill from here.”

He had awakened earlier than he’d wanted to, at 6:00, and silently gone to the dining room to bring back coffee from the twenty-four-hour urn. Julie had downed the first cup without quite waking up, which was normal even when she wasn’t suffering from jet lag. She had grunted something and held out the empty cardboard cup, and he had gone for refills. As always, the second one got her blood moving and her nerves functioning, and by the time she had finished it, she was not only speaking in intelligible words, she was feeling playful and affectionate.

He had wound up back in the bed, the time had flown by, and now, somehow, it was 7:30.

“Gideon,” she said when another five minutes had passed and they had yet to move, “do we really have to follow Dr. Haddon’s schedule? What’s the chance of our playing hooky and going out and seeing Luxor Temple? Just us?”

“I wish I could,” he said sincerely, “but I have to take the obligatory tour here at the House. But you don’t. Why don’t you go ahead on your own?”

She wrinkled her nose, the only person in the world on whom it looked absolutely stunning. “I don’t want to go ahead on my own. I want to go with you.”

It warmed him to hear her say it, but thought it only right to say otherwise. “But I can’t, Julie, and I wouldn’t want you to miss—”

“Why
do you have to take the obligatory tour?”

“Professional courtesy, for one thing. Haddon expects me to, and I
am
his guest.”

“You’re not Haddon’s guest,” she said sensibly. “You’re the Horizon Foundation’s guest. You’re here to narrate a film, that’s all. You’re not an Egyptologist and don’t pretend to be one, you’re not a board member like Bruno, or the power behind a board member like Bea, and this may be our one and only free morning in Luxor. Unless you’d rather spend it learning more about Middle Egyptian hieroglyphs and epigraphic techniques, of course.”

He raised the eyebrow that wasn’t pressed against the pillow. “Are you kidding? But how do I get out of it? What do I tell Haddon?”

“Tell him that your wife insists on going into Luxor, and she greatly desires your company, and her every wish is your command.”

Gideon considered this for a few moments. Then he kissed her a final time, on the spot on her nose where the wrinkle had been, rolled out of bed, and began getting back into his clothes.

“I will,” he said, and did.

Chapter Eight

The distance from the front gate of the Horizon House compound to Luxor Temple was well under a mile, all of it along the avenue referred to as Shari el-Bahr on maps, but invariably called the Corniche by locals and tourists alike— as the riverfront street in every Nile town and city is called the Corniche, whatever its designated name. Remnants of the French influence die hard in Egypt. Luxor’s Corniche was a particularly handsome, tree-shaded boulevard that ran beside the Nile for the length of the city, with tourist shops and fine hotels and high-walled gardens on one side, and posh, white cruise ships moored along the quays on the other.

At 8:45 a.m. the sun was not yet oppressive, the smog not yet risen, and the Corniche relatively quiet, the trucks and tour buses having yet to come out in force. The roadway was almost free of traffic, and what there was, was picturesque: bicycles, robed men on slow-moving donkeys or in donkey-pulled carts, and the ubiquitous, garishly pretty horse-drawn taxis called caleches (another tag-end of Napoleon’s occupation). Cars passed not once in two minutes. Instead of blaring horns, diesel engines, and screamed curses, there was only a muted clip-clopping, lazy and affable.

On the face of it, then, the walk from Horizon House tothe great pharaonic temple of Amenhotep III should have been a relaxing and agreeable way to launch their stay in Egypt, a peaceful, fifteen-minute stroll through the middle of an exotic picture postcard.

Exotic it certainly was; relaxing and quiet, by no means. In six years, Gideon had almost forgotten what it was like for foreigners, especially reasonably well-dressed foreigners, to walk down a street in an Egyptian tourist center. Anytime they stopped for even a few seconds to admire the view of the Nile, or to tie a shoelace, or to wonder what lay behind some ornately gated high wall, men and boys, all with goods or services to sell, appeared from nowhere to descend enterprisingly upon them.

“Welcome in Egypt!”

“Hello, English? Where you from?”

“Caleche?”

“Taxi?”

“Felucca ride, Banana Island?”

“Just look, not buy!”

“Hello, Karnak, yes? I take for nothing.”

“Come on, at least say hello. What it can hurt?”

Sometimes laughing young men would hurl a barrage of English—probably their total arsenal—at them, seemingly just for the fun of it: “Hello! Thank you! Good evening! Bye-bye! Michael Jackson!”

By the time they were halfway to the temple, they had learned, as all visitors sooner or later did, that in order to make any progress they had to avoid the eyes of strangers and ignore the frequent questions and greetings that came their way. For New Yorkers, thought Gideon, this would probably be nothing new, but for a couple of people accustomed to the neighborly, easygoing rhythms of the Pacific Northwest it was going to take some getting used to.

“I feel like the original Ugly American,” Julie said to him as they quickened their pace past a caleche driver ecstatically welcoming them to Egypt. “How cold they must think we are. But if you say something polite you end up feeling like a—like a slab of meat in the middle of a swarm of flies. And I can’t quite tell when they’re poking fun at us.”

“I know,” Gideon said sympathetically, “but it can’t be helped. I know one Egyptologist who says it’s the worst part of being here. You can’t walk three steps—at least in a place like Luxor—without being made to feel like either a sonofabitch or a sucker. He says it’d drive him crazy if he let it.”

“So what does he do?”

Gideon shrugged. “He tries not to go out in the street.”

From a distance of two blocks, the Temple of Luxor was a letdown. They had come eager to be overwhelmed, but the famed monument had next to nothing in common with the evocative nineteenth-century paintings and drawings of a great, ruined, enigmatic temple half-buried in shifting dunes, with no signs of human habitation in sight, and only the occasional artfully posed Bedouin to give it scale. They had known, of course, that it had been largely—but not altogether—dug out of the sand, but they had failed to realize how fully in the heart of downtown Luxor it now sat, looking forlorn and not so very monumental, surrounded by wide pavements, modern buildings, and passersby who didn’t bother to give it a second glance.

But once they’d paid their admissions and entered the grounds, actually walking through the tumbled, eroded masonry, the modern city receded and the magic enveloped them. How could it not? They were in the very heart of ancient Egypt’s capital city, the ceremonial center of what had been called at various times, by various peoples, the City of Amen-Ra, the Biblical city of No, the great city of Thebes (so named by the Greeks of Homer’s time, long after its heyday).

For almost two hours they prowled over the grounds at will, drawing envious looks from groups of glazed-eyed tourists being herded by umbrella-toting guides. Mostly, they walked in silence, without even a guidebook, content to take in the grandeur and history without fussing about the details. They walked reverently through the great Colonnade of Amenhotep and along the Avenue of Sphinxes; they gawked up at the First Pylon and the colossal paired statues of Ramses II. They stood before the famous rose granite obelisk, also once part of a pair, but solitary since its twin had been shipped off to Paris’s Place de la Concorde in the 1830s.

Across the river, framed by the temple’s columns and only slightly obscured by the brown haze that had materialized over the city with the daily appearance of exhaust-belching trucks and buses, was a bleak moonscape of low, corrugated hills and arid canyons. In one of those wan, scorched canyons, Gideon knew, was the most famous, most fabulous burial complex in the history of the world.

“The Valley of the Kings,” he said. “The carefully hidden tombs of Ramses after Ramses, the grand celestial chambers of Seti I and Amenhotep, the golden treasures of Tutankhamun. Sixty-four pharaohs were buried there, Julie. The Place of Truth, they called it, the City of the Dead—”

“The Forest Lawn of Egypt,” Julie said.

He blinked.

“That’s what your friend at the Smithsonian calls it,” Julie said. “If you ask me, he has a point.”

Gideon laughed. “Was I getting a little lyrical there?”

“Just a little.”

“I think maybe we’ve done enough sightseeing for a while?”

“Could be.”

“And it just occurred to me—we haven’t had anything to eat. Could you stand a little breakfast?”

She grinned up at him. “Good gosh, I thought you’d never ask.”

A few blocks back up the Corniche, the Savoy Hotel advertised a full English breakfast on its signboard, and delivered on its promise. Julie and Gideon sat in its outdoor cafe, among neat trees and potted plants, protected from the sun by a tentlike canopy, and wolfed down scrambled eggs, bacon, toast, and tea. The bacon wasn’t really bacon, and the eggs had been scrambled in something that wasn’t butter, but the tea was good, strong English tea, the marmalade was straight from Edinburgh, and all in all they had no complaints.

With every bite they could feel their strength picking up, their normally positive outlooks surging back.

“All right, I have a theory for you,” Julie said, laying marmalade on her second piece of toast.

This was announced without preface, after a long, satisfying stint of dedicated eating, but Gideon knew what she was referring to. Earlier, when he’d told her about the discovery of the el-Fuqani skeleton in the old storage enclosure, she had said little, but he could tell that she was filing the data away, and it wouldn’t be long before a hypothesis emerged.