Dead Men's Hearts

by Aaron Elkins

  "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.

  "All right, let's hear it," he said.

  He enjoyed her ideas. They were always inventive, frequently entertaining, and sometimes extremely helpful. He often discussed his forensic cases with her, and more than once—many times more than once—she had come up with an insight or observation that would never have occurred to him. Once she had solved a case for him by wondering aloud if the "polish" he'd been describing on the right first metacarpal and multangular (the bones at the base of the thumb) of a set of unidentified remains might not have been due to the repeated movement of striking a keyboard space bar. Indeed they had, and the remains had quickly been identified as those of a woman who had worked at a computer keyboard for ten years.

  He had split his consulting fee with her.

  "You said he was a scribe, right?" she said.

  "Yes, apparently."

  "Okay, I was thinking: what if there was some kind of valuable papyrus in the box with him?"

  "I don't follow you."

  "What if, among the things that he was buried with, there was a papyrus that he'd written, or scribed, or whatever they did? What if it was the papyrus that someone was after, not the skeleton? And so they just got rid of the bones in the nearest convenient place and ran off with the papyrus?"

  Gideon shook his head. "No, the el-Fuqani collection is just a bunch of remains from an ordinary, middle-class cemetery. No fancy tombs, no mummification process, no objects buried with them. Just a hole in the ground, and in they went. Besides, even if there was something in the box with him, why bother taking the bones at all, why not just the papyrus?"

  "Maybe someone had to move fast, and couldn't afford to poke around looking for it in the box, and just grabbed everything in it and ran."

  "Then why not take the whole box? It's not that big."

  "What if someone saw him running off with it?"

  "What if someone saw him running off with bones falling out of his arms?"

  "Well, yes," Julie said, "I see your point." She poured them both more tea. "What's your theory, then?"

  "Hypothesis," he corrected, "or conjecture, if you prefer." The breakfast had relaxed him and made him feel more expansive. "Theory implies a reliable inference based on at least some supporting evidence."

  "Ah," she said, lifting her eyes skyward, "the joys of being married to a professor." She picked up the teapot. "Want some more?"

  He nodded and held out his cup. "Whereas a hypothesis is little more than one of many possible tentative explanations based on incomplete—or in this case, nonexistent—evidence of any kind."

  "Keep it up," she said, pouring for both of them, "and you're going to get this in your lap." She slid the milk across to him. "What's your conjecture, then?"

  "My conjecture is that one of the students who are always spending a few weeks or months at Horizon House decided that he wanted to take a knock-'em-dead souvenir back to his room at State U, and one of the unguarded, ignored el-Fuqani skeletons made easy pickings."

  "So what was it doing in the garbage heap?"

  "Cold feet, probably. Maybe it'd been taken after a few too many beers, and in the stark, clear light of the next morning, he—or she—realized that there was going to be big trouble ahead when those bones went through Customs. So they got tossed. Safer than trying to get them back into their box." He swallowed a last forkful of eggs. "Seems like the simplest explanation to me."

  "Maybe," she said doubtfully, "but it seems to me you have to conjecture up a pretty ghoulish student to make it work."

  "Not at all. They do things like that all the time."

  "They do?"

  "They do. And not only
students. Did you ever hear of the Neiman-Marcus skull fragment?"

  She shook her head wearily. "Do I want to?"

  "The Neiman-Marcus fragment was a piece of John Kennedy's skull, so-called because, after disappearing from the street, it turned up in a respectable Dallas doctor's little collection of memorabilia, swathed in cotton in a Neiman-Marcus box."

  "Ugh."

  "Not only that, but after it was retrieved it disappeared again, and so have some of the other fragments. And where do you think Einstein's brain is?"

  She began to shake her head again, then grimaced and burst out laughing at the same time.

  He looked at her curiously.

  "I was only thinking," she said, "how dull my breakfast conversations would be if I'd married that electrical engineer from Des Moines." She shook her head wonderingly. "My God, what a question. Anyway, the answer is that I have no idea where Einstein's brain is."

  "Neither does anybody else, because, you see, somebody walked off with it, also apparently for a souvenir. And that's just for starters. There's Emanuel Swedenborg's skull, Josef Haydn's—"

  She held up her hand. "Thank, you, starters will be sufficient. Tell me, how does the disappearing head that Haddon saw—"

  "—or says he saw."

  "—fit into this? Or don't you have a conjecture?"

  "On that," said Gideon, "I don't even have a surmise. My guess—"

  "Is that above or below a surmise?"

  "Below. My guess is he imagined it. Nobody else saw it." He glanced at his watch. "Maybe we ought to be getting back. We're flying to el-Amarna in a few hours."

  "We have time to finish our tea. Let's relax for a few more minutes. It's lovely here."

  "It is that."

  "Come to think of it," Julie said, "why are we going to el-Amarna anyway? What's at el-Amarna?"

  "El-Amarna, or rather Tel el-Amarna, is the modern name for Akhetaten, the city built by Akhenaten as his new capital when he decided to move the court out of Thebes—"

  "Yes, I know all that. A new center of worship to his beloved god Aten, rather than Amon."

  "That's right."

  "Well, you don't have to sound so amazed. I do have an education, you know. But my question is: why are they filming there? What does Amarna have to do with Horizon House?"

  "Not a lot, really, but Cordell Lambert's old Institute of Egyptian Studies apparently started out up there. They did a season's digging before moving to Luxor, so in a sense that's where Horizon House began. The other thing is that later on, in the 1930s and 1940s, the University of Bern was one of the outfits that ran excavations there, and one of the graduate students who worked on them and took graduate classes on the side was the young Clifford Haddon. He learned his hieroglyphs in the expedition headquarters building—which is now the Amarna Museum."

  "Ah," Julie said, nodding. "Human interest."

  They sat in companionable silence, sipping the cooling tea, digesting their breakfasts, and soaking up atmosphere. The Savoy's café was about as international as a restaurant could be. At the tables around them were Arabs, black Africans, Europeans, Americans, and Asians laughing and chattering away in a happy babble of languages. At their feet a slate-gray cat worked the crowd, moving from table to table, eyeing the clients, and then, depending on its appraisal, either waiting for a handout or moving contemptuously on. From Julie and Gideon it got offers of the baconlike mystery meat (reservedly accepted) and marmaladed toast (scornfully declined).

  "We'd better go," Gideon said after a while. "They'll start thinking we've gone over the hill altogether."

  Leaving the cafe they passed close by the table of two thin, elderly Englishmen who looked like brothers, sharing a pot of tea and a basket of pastries.

  "Smog in Luxor," said one of them, sighing deeply. "Who would have thought?"

  The other shook his head. "There wasn't any in '49, I can tell you that. Think what it's doing to the monuments."

  "Think," said the first, "what it's doing to the people."

  The other tore a piece of baklava in two and licked his slender fingers. "That too," he agreed languidly.

  * * *

  Two hours later, in the heat of the afternoon, both of the Horizon House vans drove up the Shari el-Matar to the small airport outside Luxor, arriving with twenty minutes to spare before the chartered ZAS flight to el-Minya at 2:00. In the vehicles were the participants, direct and indirect, in the making of Reclaiming History: The Story of Horizon House. In all, twelve people piled out of the vans and into the concrete-block terminal.

  Besides Julie and Gideon, there were Bea and Bruno Gustafson, representing the Horizon Foundation, and Haddon, Arlo, TJ, and Jerry from Horizon House. The ninth, tenth, and eleventh members of the group were Forrest Freeman, who was directing the documentary, and his bare-bones staff: Cy, an aging, placid, child of the sixties who wore his much-thinned hair in a graying pony tail; and Patsy, a rail-thin, sinewy woman of forty-five who smoked little black cigars and might have been mute for all she said. Cy was the cameraman. Patsy seemed to do everything else, a combination soundperson, gaffer, grip, and gofer. The third member of the crew—Kermit Feiffer, the assistant director—was being left behind in Luxor to make copies of the tapes that had already been made and do arcane things with them at the local MisrFilm studio.

  Their leader, Forrest Freeman, was a burly man of forty with the body of a wrestler and the soul of a worry wart. Forrest was a fretter, a man who expected the worst and expected it to be worse than he expected. Gideon had spoken with him for no more than five minutes at dinner the evening before, and another five in the van, but he had already heard about problems with the shooting schedule, with lighting, with transportation, with weather, and with the equipment. Actually, none of these had yet come to pass, but from Forrest's point of view, it was only a matter of time. The Fates, he seemed convinced, had it in for him personally.

  To be fair, he'd already had his share of woe. One of his crew, he told Gideon, had been arrested at the Cairo airport for bringing in half a kilo of hashish inside a camera. ("Can you believe it? Smuggling hash into the Middle East? Where do I get these guys?") Forrest had been lucky they'd let him and the rest of the crew in, but he was left with only three people instead of four, and one camera instead of two. On top of that, the authorities had gotten sticky about work permits, requiring him to finish up in Egypt and move on to his next production in Turkey five days sooner than planned. Did Gideon have any idea of the pressures that created on this job? Everything was going to have to go like clockwork.

  Only of course, Forrest had said, staring moodily out the window of the van, it wouldn't. That went without saying. But what the hell, the sooner he got to Turkey and to bribing the local officials for the permits and concessions he needed to begin work on Hunting the Anatolian Boar, the happier he would be. Five extra days in Turkey would mean, with any luck, that he would have time for some avocational hunting of his own. You could still shoot wolves, and fox, and mountain goats in the Anatolian mountains, did Gideon know that? Now there was life at its best: it was—well, splendid. Up in the morning with the sun to the smell of coffee being brewed by your guide... and Turkey! Turkey was a civilized country compared to Egypt.

  Forrest had accepted the assignment to make The Story of Horizon House in a weak moment, because it was so easy to tack onto the Turkish trip, and, frankly, the money wasn't bad, but it had been sheer misery from the beginning. In the first place, as he should have remembered, he couldn't stand Egypt; he'd made five documentaries here in the last seven years, and you'd think he'd know by now. In the second, Clifford Haddon, as he also should have remembered, was the most self-centered, fault-finding, aggravating old fart anyone ever had to deal with. And third, the project itself was the most excruciatingly dull, pedestrian thing he'd worked on since The Joy of Spring Bulbs. He didn't mind exacerbating his ulcer, he'd said, as long as it was in a meaningful cause, but this... ! He was a maker of serious films, after all, not
just another hack for hire.

  And so he was. Despite his twittering air of impending doom, Forrest had built a respectable reputation as a maker of archaeological documentaries. A few years ago Gideon had seen and admired the one that had made his name, The End of Eternity, a four-part PBS special on the destruction of Upper Egypt's greatest monuments by erosion, pollution, and the crush of tourists. That had been a six-month project, produced as well as directed by Forrest, and he had done most of his on-site research at the Horizon House library, getting to know the institution and its people.

  All of which made The Story of Horizon House a natural for him, at least from the foundation's point of view.

  The last of the twelve was Gideon and Julie's old friend, Phil Boyajian, free spirit. Divorced (amicably), a few years older than Gideon, and also an ex-student of Abe Goldstein's, he now lived in Bellingham, a couple of hours north of Seattle. Of all the anthropologists Gideon knew, Phil had had perhaps the most peculiar career. Armed with a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology and Middle Eastern studies, he had begun with fieldwork in Jordan and Tunisia, but claimed it made him feel like a voyeur. So he'd taken an assistant professorship at the University of Washington, only to find university politics more than he could stand. He'd then tried teaching at a Seattle junior college, but couldn't bear the committee assignments. And finally, completing this resolutely backward progression, he'd wound up teaching at a high school in Olympia, which had kept him contented for almost five years— a long time for Phil.

  Then, seven or eight years ago, he'd spent a summer vacation doing travel research for a new guidebook called Egypt on the Cheap, geared primarily to students and backpackers. The book had been a great success, and Phil was now firmly and happily ensconced as a contributing editor to the flourishing On the Cheap series, which helped travelers get around in developing countries with a minimum of stress and confusion. In addition, two or three times a year he accompanied alumni tours to North Africa or the Middle East, acting as a sort of cultural liaison to ensure that their existence was as untroubled as possible. Whenever he came back from such a trip, Gideon and Julie could be assured of an evening's good stories, but this time they wouldn't have to wait for them. It was Phil who had arranged the flight to el-Amarna, and the Nile cruise, and he was along to head off whatever problems might arise.