Dead Men's Hearts

by Aaron Elkins

  The space into which they emerged from the stairwell had sacks of rice, or beans, or flour stacked in one corner, clean towels and linens in open boxes in another, and some hammocks and bedclothes thrown carelessly into yet another. Other hammocks, still strung on hooks attached to walls and posts, were being pulled down by excited crew members. It was only with an effort that Gideon recognized one of the young men, in jeans and age-grayed white undershirt, as the smiling, white-jacketed boy who had played the xylophone at dinner.

  Phil led him quickly from this dormitory—storage room with its single naked light bulb through a galley that stank of cooking oil and engine exhaust. There was a chef's sink, two big food lockers on opposite walls, and an enormous 1930s cooking range in the center with all four legs in kerosene-filled tuna cans to keep the roaches at bay. An aproned old man sitting on a stool, apparently annoyed at having his work schedule disrupted, grumbled at them as they went by, a half-inch cigarette stub jiggling on his lip.

  The back door of the galley led to a small deck at the stern, where there was a deeply worn butcher-block table at which the kitchen staff chopped everything from sides of beef to bunches of scallions. Here too was where food deliveries were made from shore, and where the crew came for their breaks, to sit on the deck, and talk, and smoke, their backs against the gunwale.

  There were two crew members there now, but they weren't sitting and they weren't smoking. They stood, frightened and anemic-looking in the mix of light from a single yellow bulb beside the door and a washed-out dawn just cracking the sky over the eastern mountains. Phil said a few words, at which they nodded apprehensively and tried to cram themselves still further into the niche on the other side of the table as far as possible from the figure on the deck.

  "Well, there he is," Phil said unnecessarily.

  Haddon lay on his back, spreadeagled across the rough decking, still oozing water from hair and clothes. He'd died with his eyes slightly open, so that tache noire, as the pathologists called it, had already stained the whites to a muddy tobacco-brown. That would have taken a few hours, Gideon knew, and suggested that the thump heard some six hours earlier had indeed been him. And, yes, he'd certainly landed on his head; that was all too clear. Medically speaking, he'd sustained a twelve- or fifteen-centimeter depressed fracture involving both parietals just anterior to lambda. In layman's terms, a saucer-sized disc of bone—almost the entire crown of skull—had been driven into his head. In effect, there wasn't any more crown.

  Gideon knew this because a good part of the cracked, splintered bone was visible. Haddon's scalp had split open from the impact, which also must have meant a tremendous and immediate loss of blood—no other surface of the body was so well supplied with blood vessels, and when it was ruptured you could always count on a terrific mess. The massively broken skull had meant more mess, of even a worse sort. But Haddon's body and clothing were unsullied by blood, or brains, or anything else. Six hours of being hauled along in the wake of a fast-moving cruise ship had taken care of that.

  Thank the Lord for small mercies, Gideon thought. He had never claimed to be among the most strong-stomached of forensic scientists, and this was six o'clock in the morning.

  He knelt gingerly beside the body and ran his eyes over it. Haddon was wearing the ridiculous, oversized bush jacket he'd had on all day yesterday, still buttoned but rucked up around his chest. If he'd been wearing shoes they were lost to the Nile, as was one of his socks. The combination of death and water had diminished him terribly. Beneath his soaked and clinging clothing he was as scrawny and pathetic as a drenched monkey. Even the proud tuft of beard was plastered down into sodden lumps below an open, gray-lipped mouth.

  After a few minutes Gideon sat back on his heels with a sigh.

  "Shouldn't we close his eyes?" Phil asked uneasily. "They're terrible to look at."

  "I'm not going to touch him," Gideon said.

  Phil looked at him curiously but said nothing.

  Some of Gideon's reluctance was constitutional, an old story. Despite repeated exposure, he had never learned to feel easy around recent, violent death. He leaned back on his haunches and turned his face away from Haddon, up to the soft, thick breath of the Nile for a moment. How was it, he wondered, as he did a lot these days, that he kept finding himself in situations like this? And would he ever get used to them? No, he didn't want to get used to them. At least he was well past the stage of throwing up, which he'd done into a stainless steel sink in San Francisco's Hall of Justice on his first or second homicide, admittedly a lot more awful-looking than Haddon was. He'd thrown up, and then rolled up his eyeballs and keeled over onto the tiled floor, plop.

  Old Wilkie, the coroner, had been scandalized at the time, but he'd been dining out on the story ever since. Even now, Gideon heard it back every once in a while from somebody who'd newly heard it from Wilkie.

  But there was more to his reluctance to handle the body than simple aversion. The striking timing and peculiar conditions of Haddon's death had never stopped playing on his mind, despite what he'd said to Julie. Over the railing and into the river in the dead of night. If he hadn't happened to hit the little projecting platform, and if his jacket hadn't gotten hung up on the little metal post, he'd be many miles behind them by now, at the bottom of the Nile. It would have been days before the gases of decomposition brought him to the surface, and then the current would have kept him headed in the opposite direction, downstream toward Cairo, the Delta, and the Mediterranean.

  With all of the refuse floating in the Nile, the chances of ever finding him again would have been slim at best. In the single afternoon of their cruise so far, Gideon had seen a water buffalo and a dog bobbing slowly by, and several big clumps of organic material that he'd chosen not too look at too closely. And if Haddon's body had gotten caught in or under the choked masses of water hyacinth that appeared now and then, clotted with thick, yeasty froth, no one would ever have seen him again.

  But he had hit the platform, and he had gotten hung up on the post, and now he was lying on the deck in plain sight, and there was something about him—about his body—that puzzled Gideon.

  He stood up, realizing that full daylight had come. The overhead light had been turned off without his noticing. And the Menshiya was passing under a bridge, pulling toward a sizable city. He walked to the side of the ship and looked down at the waterswept wooden platform about a foot above the river's surface.

  "This is what he was caught on?"

  "That's right," Phil said.

  Gideon examined it closely, not only the surface of the wood but the projecting ends of the steel supports. He looked at the outer surface of the gunwale too, and leaned out to look up along the side of the ship, then down to as much of it as he could see beneath the surface of the water. Then he pulled his head back and stood thinking.

  "Phil, do you know who it was that heard that thump last night?"

  "Yes, Mahmoud here." He gestured at one of the two men; a boy, rather, of seventeen or eighteen, who longed transparently to be anyplace in the world other than right there. "The same lucky guy who found him this morning and pulled him out of the water with his friend here."

  "I'd like to ask him a few questions. Could you translate?"

  "Of course." Phil addressed a few friendly words to him, and the boy, in grease-stained, canary-yellow trousers and a sleeveless, faded blue Atlanta Braves sweatshirt, came forward a couple of hesitant steps, trying to smile but not quite managing it.

  "I'd like to know exactly what he heard."

  Phil asked, then listened to the answer. "A bump and a splash," he said. Mahmoud added a few sentences. "Even at the time, his first thought was that somebody had fallen overboard."

  "And he's positive it came from here?"

  Phil's question received a vigorous nod and a long, excited recitation.

  "He says he ran back here and looked for a long time. He had his pole ready to drag someone back in, but he couldn't see Haddon because he was ho
oked on the post at the front of the platform, so he was being dragged along underneath it, where there wasn't a chance of seeing him in the dark. Besides, it never occurred to him that anything was caught on the ship itself. He was searching the water behind it. The poor kid's afraid he's going to lose his job over this."

  "No, he didn't do anything wrong. We can speak up to the captain for him if need be."

  Mahmoud looked only marginally heartened when this was passed along in Phil's reassuring fashion.

  "When he found him this morning," Gideon said, "how was Haddon in the water? Face up? Face down? On his side?"

  "On his side," Phil said after getting an answer, "with his back against the ship. The epaulet was caught from behind."

  "When he pulled him up onto the deck, did he possibly bump Haddon's face against anything?"

  "If he did, I assure you he's not going to say so."

  "Probably not, but ask him anyway. Tell him he's not going to get in any trouble."

  Mahmoud's answer was earnest and involved, with the other crewman chiming in too. There was much ardent chest-pounding.

  "They say they couldn't have been more careful. They handled him like a baby. They swear on Allah's name that his head was broken before they ever touched him."

  Gideon almost smiled.

  "What's up, Gideon?" Phil asked. "Why all the questions? Is there a problem?" "I think so, Phil."

  He got back down on one knee, beside the dead man's ashen face, to look again at two relatively inconspicuous sets of marks in the skin, one on the prominence of Haddon's left cheek, the other on the rounded part of his forehead above the half-closed left eye. Compared to the wound at the top of his head, of course, anything would have been relatively inconspicuous, but these really were nothing very striking, nothing very serious. The ones on the cheek were a couple of straight, half-inch-long scratches or indentations, parallel to each other, an inch apart, and offset by about half an inch. The ones on the forehead were similar, but instead of being parallel, the two lines intersected to form a perfect little X. These too were superficial. There had been no bruising, and probably not much bleeding.

  "These marks on his face," Gideon said. "Do you remember seeing them yesterday?"

  Phil leaned close to Haddon for a better look. As a man who had put in a lot of time in the back alleys of Cairo and Istanbul, squeamishness wasn't one of his problems.

  "No," he said, straightening up. "They weren't there yesterday, not at dinner."

  "So when did he get them?" Gideon asked as he got to his feet. "That's the problem."

  "Are you serious? The man falls from the upper deck onto his face, cracks open his head, is then dragged alongside a boat for five hours, and you're wondering why he's scratched?"

  "He didn't fall onto his face, he fell onto the top of his head.

  "All right, he scraped it on the way down, against the side of the ship."

  "They're not scrapes, they're clean, sharp impact abrasions—well, I think they are. What you get from being hit straight on."

  "Well, then, why couldn't he have bumped his head on the railing before he toppled over? He was pretty thoroughly potted, remember."

  "He hit his head on the railing and then fell over it? That's a little hard to imagine, no matter how potted he was."

  "All right, then, perhaps you're wrong about his landing strictly on his head. Perhaps he fell in such a way as to strike both his face and... no?"

  Gideon was shaking his head. He brought Phil over to the side to look at the small outboard platform.

  Phil looked. "What am I supposed to see?"

  "What did he hit his face on? What is there to make those parallel lines, that X?"

  "Well ..." Phil cocked his head and rubbed his hand over his short brown hair. "You know, you're right," he said. And where there had been a tolerant skepticism before, there was something else now: a thoughtfulness, a quickening interest.

  "I see where it is you're heading, Gideon. Let me make sure I have it straight. Are you saying that someone killed him? Someone hit him in the face with something, maybe knocked him unconscious? And then threw him overboard? Because of... what? That affair with the statue head? Is that what you're thinking?"

  Yes, it was what he was thinking, it was precisely what he was thinking. But hearing it laid out as baldly as that, he found himself backing off. This wouldn't be the first time he'd let himself get carried away on ambiguous little forensic clues—on hunches, really. Sometimes there turned out to be something to them; more often there didn't.

  "Well, I'm not ready to go as far as that, Phil."

  But now he'd gotten Phil going. "Baloney, I know you, Gideon. That's what you think, all right. And I think you're right."

  "Not necessarily. How do we know he didn't hurt his face after dinner last night, two or three hours before he went overboard?"

  Phil laughed. "Do I have to convince you now?"

  "Maybe he walked into his door or something, or slipped in his cabin. It's possible. He was pretty potted."

  "Good point. Let's go and check." Although three inches the shorter of the two, he tried to turn Gideon around by the shoulders and aim him toward the door.

  Gideon dug in his heels. "What do you mean, check?"

  "Let's go and look at Haddon's cabin and see what we can find." He administered an encouraging little shove. "Come on, come on."

  Gideon held his ground. "Phil, you know we can't do that."

  "Why not? We can get the key from Wahab."

  Gideon laughed. Phil's attitude toward bothersome trivia like rules, regulations, and minor laws was unabashedly pragmatic. Action over talk, that was his motto, with a plan to suit every occasion. In its way it was one of the most appealing things about him, and it was one of the things that made him so successful at what he did, having gotten him and his charges out of tight spots around the world. But it had also gotten him into jams in places where getting into jams wasn't a good idea. Once he had spent two nights in a Damascus jail because, in an effort to get better treatment for his tour group, he had claimed to be a distant cousin of Hafez Assad. Another time he had pretended to be a drug enforcement agent in Jordan, with similar results.

  "Never mind the key," Gideon said. "Just calm down now. The point is, we've got a violent death here, and the police are on their way to investigate it, and one of the things I'm not about to do is go poking around in the victim's belongings and messing up possible evidence before they even get started."

  Gideon expected an argument but Phil's wiry shoulders rose in an amiable shrug. "If you say so."

  "Believe me, they'll spot those marks on his face for themselves. They'll know what to do."

  "Mm."

  "What does 'Mm' mean?"

  But the ship had reversed its engines and was shuddering to a halt beside a cracked, concrete-and-rubble mooring dock at the foot of a dusty, awakening city.

  "Beautiful downtown Sohag," Phil said.

  They went to the side to watch the sailors throw out and secure the lines—ragged young bystanders on shore lent eager hands—and swing out the gangplank. Two men were waiting to board, one of them erect and natty in a military-style uniform, the other a stooped old man in a decades-old black suit without a tie, holding an ancient, cracked, doctor's black bag to his chest with both arms.

  Once the gangplank was in place, Mr. Wahab came hurrying down to greet them, and a few minutes later the newcomers appeared on the stern deck, with Mr. Wahab flitting anxiously behind them.

  "I have the honor," he sang out nervously from behind the officer's right shoulder, screwing his eyes to the side in an effort to avoid looking at Haddon's body, "to present Mr. Hamsa el-Basset, Commanding General of River and Tourist Police, Governate of Sohag."

  Chapter Thirteen

  The man was every inch a general: ruggedly handsome, assured, authoritative. A person of consequence. He was meticulously turned out in a simple but perfectly tailored uniform with glossy Sam Browne belt, holste
red pistol, and creamy, creaking boots redolent of leather polish. His cap was under his arm, revealing thick, black, oiled hair brushed straight back (with silver-backed military brushes, no doubt) from a face that was narrower at the graying temples than at the muscular, cleanly shaven jaw.

  His hopelessly outdone companion, by comparison, looked like Gabby Hayes on a bad morning at the cookstove. A wrinkled, bent, dour man—"No English" had been his curt, muttered greeting on being introduced—he seemed to have come directly from bed and didn't look any too pleased about it. He was close to eighty, with sleep-mussed white hair, a week-old stubble of beard, and a drooping mustache that covered his mouth like a filter of tobacco-stained baleen. In the open neck of his misbuttoned shirt could be seen what looked like the top of a pair of grimy longjohns. This, el-Basset said in barely accented English, was Dr. Dowidar, consulting physician to the Ministry of Public Security, who would be conducting the official examination of the body.

  On second thought Gideon decided that it might be a good idea to point out those abrasions after all.

  "General," he began, as Dowidar put his case on the deck and leaned grumbling over the body, "I'm a physical anthropologist, and I do a lot of work with the police in my country. I'd—"

  El-Basset examined him closely for the first time, not hostilely, but not cordially either. "Oh, yes?"

  Police, thought Gideon, were the same everywhere, at least in one regard: they did not appreciate unsolicited incursions onto their turf. Sometimes not even solicited ones.

  "As you know, I've just looked at Dr. Haddon, and I thought I should call to your attention—"