by Aaron Elkins
"Thank you, but for now I wish to examine these matters for myself. And I wish first to speak with this boy, who was first at the scene of the accident."
Mahmoud, seeing himself indicated, responded instantaneously with a toothy, accommodating grin. Either that, Gideon thought, or he was having a psychomotor disturbance induced by extreme terror. It was probably the first time he'd had direct intercourse with a police official as grand as the Commanding General of River and Tourist Police. Most of the policemen to be seen in Egypt were ragged recruits like the sleepy young man with the safety-pinned private's stripe who'd been guarding the boat at el-Amarna. He'd been wearing laceless blue sneakers, not soft, gleaming boots, with his old woolen uniform.
"You will excuse me for the time being?" el-Basset said, already turning away.
"General," Gideon said, "I'm not sure it was an accident."
El-Basset paused to look at him again with a tolerant smile. "Not an accident? What then?" He might have been speaking to a precocious twelve-year-old.
Don't get touchy, Gideon told himself. It's just the guy's manner. "There are some indications of trauma that suggest—"
"No, no," el-Basset said, waving the rest away, "I'm extremely sorry but we must get on with our procedure now."
"But—"
"Please." El-Basset raised a peremptory hand. "Everything in good time."
"Look, General," Gideon said, openly bridling now, "what—"
"Um—" Phil touched Gideon's elbow. "Time to go, I think."
On the stairs Gideon was fuming. "Did you see that? He didn't hear anything I said. He barely knew I was there."
" 'The barking of a dog does not disturb the man on a camel.' Phil said. "Old Egyptian proverb."
"Great, just what I need."
When they got back upstairs, Phil laid a hand on Gideon's arm. "Would you like a word of advice?"
"Sure."
"I wouldn't go around telling the Egyptian police how to do their job."
Gideon nodded. "Or any police," he said.
* * *
Julie shook her head doubtfully. "But how can you be so sure he didn't get those scratches when the sailors pulled him up? It would have been a struggle getting him into the boat."
"No," Gideon said, stripping the peel from a finger-sized Nile banana, "I think Mahmoud and his pal were telling the truth."
"Even if they were, they might have hit his face against something without knowing it."
"I don't think so. Postmortem abrasions have a funny look to them—yellow, almost translucent. If they happen before death, they're sort of rust-colored, pretty much the way they are on living people—and that's what these were."
"I'm impressed. I didn't know you knew so much about that kind of thing."
"I guess I've seen enough of it by now," Gideon said. "Unfortunately."
He looked at the banana and decided he didn't want it after all. Instead, he poured himself some more coffee.
A simple buffet breakfast had been laid in the dining room. Gideon and Julie had taken a pitcher of coffee and a plate of fruit, pastries, and hardboiled eggs up to the swimming pool area, preferring the outdoors to the grim atmosphere of the dining room and the subdued but glittery-eyed discussions of Haddon's demise. Julie had started on some date bread while Gideon told her about what had happened, but she soon lost her appetite. Gideon had never had any.
"So the question is," she said, "what would make marks like that?"
"Right. I keep trying to come up with a simple, innocent explanation. Sometimes if a person is hit with the flat side of something hard and narrow—a board, say—you get those parallel lines, because the edges dig into the skin. But a lot of bruising usually goes along with that because the flat part crushes blood vessels underneath. And there isn't any bruising on Haddon."
"So what would be a simple, innocent explanation?"
"That he accidentally hurt his face sometime between dinner and the time he fell over. I'd just feel more comfortable if I could figure out on what. It's that X that's so peculiar. What would do that? A tool of some kind? A... Hi, Phil."
Phil had slipped into a vacant chair at their table with a self-satisfied expression on his face and a tray with a cup of tea and a couple of gooey, stringy cakes drenched in honey in his hands. "You two are looking mightily puzzled."
"We were talking about those marks on Haddon. I still can't—"
"Well, it wasn't anything in his room, I can tell you that." He lifted one of the dripping cakes above his head, lowered it carefully to his mouth, end first, and bit half of it neatly off. Not a driblet of honey made it to his chin.
"You went to his room?" Gideon said.
Phil nodded, chewing. "Certainly I went to his room. Of course I went to his room."
Gideon leaned back. "Why am I not surprised?"
"As I remember it," Phil said, "you said you couldn't go in there. That's fine. I didn't say I couldn't go in there. Don't worry, I didn't step on any clues."
"Phil—"
"What did you find?" Julie asked.
"Nothing that could have made those marks. No convenient mirror, or picture frame, or table, or box with sharp corners that he might have cut his face on, no projecting cupboard doors, no convenient X-shaped rivets on the walls. Nothing."
"Well, that's something to know," Gideon said.
"So I thought I'd walk around the deck and see what I could find." In went the other half of the pastry, to be followed by a swig of tea.
"And?" Gideon said.
"And I did," Phil said around the mass of food, then set himself to serious chewing.
Gideon looked at Julie. "Do you suppose he's planning to tell us what he found anytime soon?"
"Not just something," Phil said, getting most of it down. "I found what we're looking for."
Abruptly, he was out of his chair. "Come along, Skeleton Detective, I'll explain the whole thing to you." He led them rapidly around the swimming pool to the port railing.
"There you are," he said, pointing straight down, toward their feet.
They were standing near the center of the ship at a gate in the railing that was now closed and locked, but was used for boarding from the port side. At those times the gangplank was hooked to a grating in the deck, a two-by-three-foot rectangle fitted into a space that had been cut in the flooring for it, and on which they were now standing. There was an identical arrangement on the starboard side, to which the gangplank was now attached.
Looking through the open grillwork of the grate, Gideon could see a section of the lower deck twenty feet below them.
"What do you think?" Phil asked. "Is that what did it or not?"
He was pointing at something below, but Gideon couldn't make out what. The life-ring holder? The bench alongside the crew's cabin? "Is what what did it, damn it?"
"No, not down there, here." He tapped his foot. "This, you dummy. The grating."
"The grating?" Gideon echoed, and then he understood. "The grating!"
He dropped to one knee beside it. It was a latticework of sturdy, edge-up metal strips that crossed each other to form diamond-shaped spaces. The sides of the diamonds were about an inch apart, and because a diamond was a rhombus the parallel lines were slightly offset, precisely like the parallel marks on Haddon's cheeks.
And each intersection was, of course, a perfect little X.
"Well?" Phil demanded.
Gideon got to his feet. "You're right," he said softly. "He fell. Here, on his face."
Julie let out a sigh. "What a relief. That is," she said quickly, "it's a relief to know nobody hit him in the face, nobody threw him overboard. There's no murderer in our midst. An innocent slip by a tipsy man on a dark night, that's all."
Phil scratched his cheek. "Too bad, in a way. I mean to say, as long as he's dead in any case, a murder would have made it more interesting, if you know what I mean." He frowned. "I didn't put that very well, but it was exciting while it lasted, wasn't it?"
G
ideon was looking down at the grating, his arms folded. "Don't write it off too soon."
"Uh-oh," Julie murmured, "here comes a new theory. Pardon, hypothesis."
"Whenever you find facial impact abrasions from a fall," Gideon said, almost to himself, "it's almost certainly a sign that the person wasn't conscious at the time that he went down. Nobody, tipsy or not, lands flat on his face like that. You turn your head, you throw up your hand to break the fall. It's instinctive."
Julie frowned at him. "All right, so he lost consciousness and fell. Maybe he had more to drink in his room. What's so suspicious about it?"
"It's not suspicious that he fell, it's suspicious that he got up again."
"I don't understand," Julie said.
"I don't understand either," Phil said.
"How did he get over the side?" Gideon asked them.
"How?" Julie said. "He got to his feet, he staggered to the railing, he lost his balance again—"
Gideon shook his head. "When you pass out from drinking it's because your central nervous system has essentially collapsed on you. And your blood alcohol level doesn't start going down just because you've stopped drinking, it keeps on rising because the alcohol is still being absorbed. An hour into unconsciousness you're drunker than you were when you passed out; a lot of times that's when people die. Believe me, nobody who passes out drunk is going to be getting up on his own steam anytime soon."
Phil leaned his arms on the railing, gazing across the river. "So you're implying ..."
"I'm implying Haddon was unconscious—maybe dead—when he fell here on the deck. I'm saying it took somebody else to get him over the side."
"We're back to murder?" Julie said. "Oh gosh, what now?"
"Now," Gideon said, "I think I better go take on the Commanding General of River and Tourist Police, Governate of Sohag." He pushed himself away from the railing. "Not that I'm looking forward to it."
"Try not to make him mad," was Phil's helpful counsel.
* * *
General el-Basset was not to be found on the stern deck when Gideon got there a minute later. Neither was Dr. Dowidar or either of the sailors. And neither was Haddon. The decking where he'd lain had already been swabbed. Gideon was astonished. He'd been gone only an hour.
At the guest services desk upstairs Mr. Wahab told him that the general was in the guest library next to the dining room. He also informed him, with equal parts outraged dignity and nervous distress, that nothing such as this had ever happened before in the history of the Happy Nomad Navigation Company.
Gideon offered his apologies, which seemed to make him feel a little better.
He found el-Basset at the single table that almost filled the little room, a row of outdated Country Lifes on the magazine rack behind him and an emptied Turkish coffee cup at his elbow. He was smoking a cigarette and making notes in Arabic in a pad, but looked up when he saw Gideon approaching, screwed the top on his fountain pen, and motioned him into a chair across from him. He appeared at peace with himself; relaxed and above it all.
"You wished to talk," he said. "I was about to come and find you."
"Ah," Gideon said. Permit me to doubt, he thought.
"Now. What may I do for you? Would you like me to call for something to drink? I can recommend the coffee."
Gideon wasn't interested in social amenities. "Where's Dr. Haddon?" he asked bluntly.
El-Basset eyed him levelly while he took a long pull on his cigarette. The remains, he explained, had been taken by ambulance to the hospital in Sohag, where they would be kept under refrigeration while the American embassy in Cairo was contacted. Then, in all probability—
He paused. "Is there something the matter? You're frowning."
Yes, something was the matter. What kind of fatal-accident investigation—an unwitnessed accident under ambiguous circumstances—could be wrapped up in an hour, including releasing the remains? Were there to be no lab tests? No interviews? What was going on?
Not that Gideon said this aloud. He wasn't intimidated by el-Basset—not exactly—but he was well aware that customs varied from one place to another, that he had no status in this, that he was far from his own turf in every sense of the word, and that there was only one driver's seat and the commanding general's well-tailored bottom was in it.
Even so, he didn't see how he could just drop it. "There were some things I wanted to mention about the body," he said mildly. "Did you happen to notice the marks on his face?"
"Certainly I noticed them, as did Dr. Dowidar. Everything will be contained in the report."
"You didn't find them unusual?"
El-Basset smiled, polished and confident. "When a man falls twenty feet onto his head, a few unusual marks are to be expected."
"He didn't get these when he fell."
Gideon explained about the grating. El-Basset heard him out.
"So it may very well be," he said. "Thank you, I'll see that it's put in the report."
Gideon stared at him. Put it in the report without checking for himself? "I think it raises some questions," he said. "General, it's been my experience that when you find facial impact abrasions from a fall, they indicate that the person wasn't conscious when he fell."
"Has it? In my experience, not necessarily," el-Basset said pleasantly. "But let's say you're right. Tell me, what are these questions that are raised?"
He lit a second cigarette from the first, settled back with his arms crossed, and gave Gideon his attention. It was hard to miss the point: el-Basset would listen, but Gideon had only one more cigarette's worth of time. There were other things on el-Basset's plate, other places to be.
"Questions as to just what happened," Gideon said. "How does a man who collapses unconscious on the upper deck end up over the side?"
"How? He arises, then collapses a second time. Dr. Haddon had had a great deal to drink. Dr. Haddon, like many elderly people, was also taking antidepressant medication for his chronic depression."
"He was?" Gideon said.
If it was true, it cleared up something that had been bothering him. Haddon had been drinking, but not recklessly; not to a fall-down-drunk-and-pass-out-cold degree. But even a couple of drinks combined, say, with one of the tricyclic antidepressants—
El-Basset smiled, pleased at having told Gideon something he hadn't known. "Oh, yes, I have been talking to people, you know. Our investigation has been quite thorough."
"Ah," Gideon said again. You must be an awfully fast talker, he thought.
"Alcohol and drugs," el-Basset said. "They don't go well together. What then is so questionable about his falling down while he walks the deck, then picking himself up and falling a second time, but this time, poof, over the side?"
"It doesn't strike you as unlikely that someone who collapses—goes into a coma—from a combination of drugs and alcohol is going to get up on his own and start walking around again anytime soon? By rights, he ought to still be lying up there."
Persuasive it may have been with Phil and Julie, but it missed the mark with el-Basset, who tipped his head back to laugh while he blew smoke at the ceiling.
"Yes, it strikes me as unlikely. So? I'm a policeman. If unlikely things didn't happen every day, what would I have to do? You may trust my judgment, Professor. There is nothing here to require a more serious investigation."
"I think there is, General."
El-Basset lifted his hands in mock surrender. "Go on."
Gideon told him about Haddon's extraordinary speech the previous evening. El-Basset smiled through it, a gentle, surely-you-can't-be-serious smile.
"What are you suggesting, my friend? That he was murdered because of something he knew about this Amarna head, something that would be revealed when he showed the head to others?"
"Well... yes. At least, I don't think the possibility ought to be excluded."
El-Basset shook his head. "I have noticed this before about you Americans. You have too much crime in America. It makes you suspicious over no
thing. You don't mind my saying this?"
Gideon sighed. Yes, he minded it. "I don't see what—"
"Consider what you propose," el-Basset said, leaning over the table. "A statuary head of no great value is removed from its drawer and mysteriously placed in an abandoned enclosure, where it is seen by Dr. Haddon—" The cigarette, down to its last third, was jabbed at Gideon to emphasize the point. "—Dr. Haddon and no one else. During the night it again disappears, only to be found a day later, also by Dr. Haddon, back in its drawer. It has not been stolen. It has not been made off with. It is precisely where it belongs, precisely where it all along would have been if no one had disturbed it."
He took a final pull on the cigarette and ground it out, smoke purling from his nostrils. "Now, where is a motive to murder anyone in all this?"
Gideon wished he knew, but one was there all right.
Somewhere.
"Look, General," he said, knowing that it was already too late, that he had struck out before he'd gotten started, "I know you know your business. I just think it might be a good idea to look into things more fully."
"In what way, more fully?" But his attention was already elsewhere. Gideon had had his chance; the interview was over. El-Basset glanced at his notes before slipping the tablet into his tunic. He slipped his fountain pen into a breast pocket and buttoned the flap. He glanced over the table to see if he was forgetting anything.
"Talk to the people on the ship some more, run some lab tests on Haddon—"
"And delay the ship's progress? Delay the transfer of Dr. Haddon's remains?" He laughed at the impossibility of it. "Certainly not. I have seen these things before, many times, and to my eyes we have here a simple case of death by misadventure. However, I will review the matter in light of what you've told me." He stood up and held out his hand. "Thank you for your cooperation, Professor."
There wasn't much to do but stand up, shake the proffered hand, and leave.
Game, set, and match. Gideon hadn't broken serve.
Chapter Fourteen