by Aaron Elkins
"I don't know," Kermit said, "my sister's kid is taking anthropology in high school, and according to her teacher scientific studies now prove that Cleopatra was black, and the same goes for most of the pharaohs. Are you saying she's wrong?"
Gideon sighed. Maybe he preferred Forrest after all. He gritted his teeth. "I'm saying—"
But he was saved by the appearance of a dark, wiry Egyptian who had come up behind the camera and distracted his attention with a waggle of his fingers.
"Cut, damn it!" Kermit turned furiously on the man. "Who the hell are you? Can't you see we're shooting?"
The man tapped his chest. "Ragheb." He looked thoroughly pleased with himself, the bearer of important tidings.
"And what's so goddamn important, Ragheb?"
But Ragheb wasn't there to talk to a mere assistant director. He motioned to Gideon. "Come, please?"
"Come where?" Gideon said. "Is something wrong?"
The man's eyes gleamed.
"Moomy," he announced proudly.
* * *
This time it had been found in the most isolated part of the Horizon compound, a sandy area in the extreme northeast corner that had the lumpy, pitted look of an old garbage dump over which sand and soil had settled with time, and a few scrubby plants had taken tenuous hold. It was in fact an old garbage dump; it was where Cordell Lambert and his co-workers had buried their waste early in the century, when the only things to do with garbage in Luxor had been to bury it or to burn it.
It was also the area in which Haddon had more recently directed that the rubbish from the outdoor storage enclosure, along with the bulldozed wreckage of the enclosure itself, be plowed under. To that end, under Jerry's supervision, a sizable crater had been gouged in which most of the junk had already been buried. The original pit had not been large enough, however, and now a second, smaller hole had been scooped out by the backhoe. In so doing, it had unearthed trash no different from what might have been in an American landfill of the 1920s: bits of lumber and corrugated cardboard, deteriorating clothing, shoes (some with buttons), rusted tin cans and metal corset bones, and patent medicine containers—including six that were plainly recognizable as Milk of Magnesia bottles. Apparently American stomachs had not rested easily in foreign countries even then.
These had all been brushed off and placed in fiberboard boxes ready for stowing away, presumably for future graduate students desperate for thesis topics to sift through and theorize from.
But the newly found object that had caused Gideon to be summoned was set by itself on the ground at the feet of Jerry Baroff, who regarded it contemplatively, puffing on a pipe. "TJ's at the dig this morning so they called me. I thought I better call you."
It was a plain brown paper sack the size of a large grocery bag, crumpled and soil-stained, but not old. Protruding from it was the proximal end of a broken femur, unmistakably human. Inside was a jumble of other bones, no less certainly Homo sapiens.
Gideon looked at Jerry. "Another skeleton? This is getting to be old-hat around here."
"Not exactly," Jerry said. He leaned down to point with his pipe at a row of letters on the shaft of the femur.
Gideon bent to read them, then straightened up with a perplexed frown.
"I'll be damned."
It wasn't a row of letters, it was an identification number, written in a precise, spidery, old-fashioned hand. F4360.
Chapter Fifteen
"Amazing, isn't it?" Jerry said. "All I can say is, somebody sure is bound and determined to get rid of the poor old guy."
"Except this isn't the same poor old guy," Gideon said.
Jerry peered at him. "But the numbers—"
"Look at this humerus," Gideon said, pulling it partway out of the bag. "The other one didn't have a left humerus, remember? It didn't have any cervical vertebrae either, and here's a C-5." He rummaged in the bag. "C-4 too."
"Easy for you to say," Jerry said.
Gideon probed gently through the bones. All of them were disarticulated, with only a shred or two of brown, dessicated soft tissue here and there. It seemed to be a more complete specimen than the one he'd examined the other night, and every bone seemed to have F4360 on it, in careful, crisp, slightly faded, turn-of-the-century writing like the writing on the other set.
"Is it possible that the collection has two sets of remains with the same number?" he asked.
Jerry shrugged. "Who knows what's possible? I don't think anybody's gone through the el-Fuqani stuff in 50 years. And they made a lot of mistakes in those days."
Gideon nodded. They made mistakes these days too. And not only at archaeological digs. Not long before, he'd been involved in a mixup at a medical examiner's lab when two sets of remains had inadvertently been assigned the same number. If it could happen there, in a state-of-the-art 1990s facility, then why not here?
But the numbers, the crisp, clean appearance of the numbers, had him thinking along different lines, trying to see again in his mind's eye just what all those 4360s had looked like on the previous Monday. He'd been ferociously jet-lagged then and hadn't paid much attention, but it seemed to him now that there had been a difference...
He hefted the humerus, eyes closed, then did the same with the sacrum. But it was hard to concentrate; forty feet away the backhoe reversed and moved forward, started and stopped, grumbled and snarled.
Gideon put the bones back into the bag and stood with his hands on his hips. "I think it'd be better to take these back to the lab where I can spread them out. Can I get into the annex?"
"Sure, there are some kids working in there, so the door's unlocked. I better stay with these guys a while. Who knows what kind of strange stuff they're going to turn up next?"
Whatever it was, Gideon thought, picking up the bag, it was going to have to go quite a ways to be any stranger than this.
* * *
The first thing he did was to go to the skeletal storage racks to assure himself that F4360... the first F4360... was still in its box.
It was.
All right, then. At least he wasn't letting his imagination run away with him. With the box under one arm and the bag under the other he went out into the workroom where five or six student interns were indifferently washing pottery fragments while they gossiped with morbid enthusiasm about Haddon's death and its repercussions for Horizon House. When they heard Gideon coming there was a switch to sober graduate-student-speak about horizons and time lines.
"Is there another workroom?" Gideon asked.
"Down the hall, second door on your right," he was told.
In the other room, a duplicate of the first, he closed the door behind him loudly so that they could get comfortably back to Haddon, and fifteen minutes later the two sets of remains were laid out on a library table, the largest surface in the room. The ones from the box were on his right, the ones from the sack on his left. He stepped back for a first visual comparison.
Except for a slight difference in color, they were superficially similar: dry, fragile, and crumbly, with the spidery F4360 neatly inscribed on almost every piece in very much the same Edwardian handwriting. Even the individual sets of bones came close to duplicating each other: skulls, pelves, long bones, and a few odds and ends to round things out.
But that was only superficially. If what Gideon was thinking was true there was a hell of a difference between them.
He heard Phil Boyajian talking to the students in the other room and a few seconds later he appeared with two clinking glasses of iced tea. "Jerry told me you were working on yet another bag of bones. I thought you could use this."
"Thanks, Phil." He gulped the tea mechanically, too preoccupied to cringe at the usual three spoons of sugar, Middle Eastern style, that Phil had loaded it with. Phil, who was staying at Horizon House for a few more days while he gathered On the Cheap material, pulled over a high stool and sat down to watch.
"What's ..." He blinked. "Two sets of bones with the same numbers? How can that be?"
In one hand Gideon was holding one of the femurs that had just been dug up; in the other a femur from the box. He sniffed at them alternately.
"Hm," he said.
"Really?" Phil said, ratcheting the English drawl up a notch. "How informative."
"Don't be impertinent," Gideon said. "Watch and learn." He touched both of the bones in turn to his tongue and considered.
Phil grimaced. "My God, what next? I shudder to think. Does Julie know that the man she kisses goes around doing that?"
Gideon held out the one from the bag. "Here, you try it."
Phil reared back. "You're out of your mind."
Gideon looked at him. "This from the man who never turns down a new experience? What would your readers think?"
Phil held up his hands. "You have to draw the line somewhere."
"All right, just smell it." Gideon extended the bone again.
Phil stood up, put down his tea, and sniffed, gingerly but gamely. He shook his head. "So?"
"What's it smell like?"
Phil was clearly at a loss. "Like a skeleton?"
"Like an old skeleton, right? Sort of musty, tomblike?"
Phil laughed. "Gideon, the only skeletons I've ever smelled have been old skeletons, and as I recall, this is what they smelled like. How would I know what a new skeleton smells like?"
"All right, what about this one?" Gideon held out the other femur. "This one's from the 4360 box. The first one was from the bag that just got turned up."
Phil took it from him doubtfully. "I hope I'm not being too inquisitive, but why are we standing here smelling bones, exactly?"
"Humor me."
Phil took another cautious sniff and shook his head again.
"Well?" Gideon said. "What's it smell like?"
"Like—I don't know. It doesn't have a smell."
"Not like a bone from a dig?"
"Well... I guess not. It doesn't smell like anything at all. Does that mean something?"
"I'd say it means it's a fake."
"A fake?" Phil laughed uncertainly. "A fake what?"
"A fake 4360."
He thought this over for a moment. "You mean an accidental duplication of identification numbers, an error in—"
Gideon shook his head. "I don't think so. Let's try something." He went to a steel sink along the wall, laid the femurs in it side by side, and set the rubber stopper in the drain. Then he ran a few inches of water into the tub, covering the two bones. "We'll let them sit for a minute."
He came back to the table with a magnifying glass from the shelf over the sink.
"A fake 4360," Phil was muttering, his skinny arms wrapped around himself. "Then this other set, the buried one, is the real one?"
"Seems that way." Gideon began using the magnifying glass to examine the numbers on the bones that had turned up that morning.
"And you know these mysterious and enigmatic things because the bones don't smell?"
Gideon laughed. "That and a few other things." He gave Phil the lens. "Compare the numbers on the two sets. Try the crania."
It took him only a few seconds. "The ones on this one—" He was holding the skull from the storage box. "—are fuzzier. These others—" He patted the skull unearthed by the backhoe. "—are crisper."
Gideon nodded. They were crisper, he suggested, because they'd been applied in the genuine 1920s manner: first, a patch of sealant (clear nail polish was as likely as anything else) would have been painted on the bone. Then the numbers would have gone onto this foundation in India ink, and then another layer of sealant would have been applied over them. The result was that the numbers were as clear seventy years later as they'd been the day they were put on.
But the numbers on the bones in the box had not been so painstakingly prepared. They had been written directly on the bone, and the ink had bled a little into the porous surface; not enough to notice if you weren't looking for it, but amply clear under the magnifying glass.
"Yes, I see," said Phil pensively.
"There's more," Gideon said.
The differences in color for example. Both sets of remains varied from individual bone to bone, as bones often did. But the ones from the bag—and not the ones from the box—had an amber, yellowish cast overall, and the pelvis and the two lumbar vertebrae were splotched with what looked like black lichen. The cloudy yellow sheen was the result of a gluey coat of shellac that had routinely been applied to skeletal material in the 1920s because it was thought to be the best way to preserve it. The black, lichenlike stains, on the other hand, went back quite a bit further. They were the residue of the asphaltlike substance that had been so copiously (and frustratingly, from the point of view of Egyptologists) smeared onto and inside mummies in ancient times.
"Now wait," Phil said. "Even I know that el-Fuqani was a commoners' cemetery. They wouldn't have been mummified."
"No, but even so they sometimes pumped a load of the stuff into the abdomen before they laid them in the ground, more or less for form's sake. That's why the stains are just on the pelvis and lower vertebrae."
Phil sipped his tea. "Ah, so."
None of these indicators, Gideon went on, were to be seen on the bones from the storage box. Hence, (a) they weren't from Lambert's dig, and (b) the chances were that they had never been on the inside of an ancient Egyptian at all.
"No offense, Gideon," Phil said at length, "but why didn't you mention any of this the other night when you looked at it?"
"I didn't mention it because I didn't notice it," Gideon said ruefully, "which is what I get for trying to show off when I'm half-asleep."
" 'He who plays with cats must bear the scratches,' " said Phil. "Another old Egyptian proverb, or maybe that one's Persian. Tell me, what was the business about tasting them?"
"Oh, I was thinking about all the trouble Luxor has with salts in the soil. I thought I might be able to taste them, assuming the bones spent a few millennia in the ground."
"And?"
"See for yourself," Gideon said. "Take your pick, any bone will do."
Phil smiled. "Why don't you just tell me?"
"The ones from the bag taste salty," Gideon said, "and the ones from the storage box don't."
"Which must mean you're right." Phil looked down at the bones. "The ones from the bag, the ones they just dug up, are the real McCoy. The ones they found the other night are fakes, new bones." He glanced up with a peculiar expression. "How new, I wonder."
"Ah, I almost forgot." Gideon went to the sink, got out the femurs, and patted them dry with paper towels from a roll on the wall. "Let's do some more smelling."
"Oh, good," Phil said.
Gideon sniffed at each of them.
"Strange," Phil murmured. "All those cases of yours that I've heard you talk about—I'm not sure what I pictured you doing, but I always imagined the basic tools were calipers and suchlike. I never realized the job was fundamentally nosework."
"More than you might think. Take another whiff yourself, will you?"
With a sigh of forbearance, Phil complied.
"Now it smells like wet old skeleton," he said. "Which one is this?"
"The real one, the one from the bag. Now try the other one."
Phil held it to his nose, sniffed, lifted his eyebrows, and sniffed again. "Now that's interesting. It's got a smell now. Like... like... what am I trying to... candles! It smells like wax."
"Exactly," Gideon said. "What you're smelling is the grease in the bone, the fat. It's what bones smell like for a few years after the flesh is gone. Sometimes, if the odor's started to fade, putting them in water brings it out. And it means the remains are recent."
"How recent?"
"Oh... under ten years, anyway. Two to five years would be my guess."
Phil picked up the skull that went with the femur. "This is only about five years old?" "Maybe a year or two more."
Phil regarded him gravely, eyes narrowed. "So, Doctor, I take it you might be revising your earlier opinion?" Gideon fro
wned. "My earlier opinion?"
Phil patted the skull. "About this gentleman having been a Fifth Dynasty scribe."
He cackled with laughter, and after a moment Gideon burst out laughing too. "I may have to rethink that, yes."
"Well, that's very reassuring to us poor mortals. To know that even the great Skeleton Detective can screw up sometimes."
"Royally," Gideon said.
"But you know," Phil said, "this is extremely weird. If you're right, think about what it means. Sometime in the last ten years someone takes the real 4360 from its box and buries it in the old dump—the old old dump. Then he substitutes a new skeleton for it—and where do you get a new skeleton, by the way?—and goes to the not inconsiderable trouble of writing all the numbers in this delicate, old-fashioned script to make it look authentic. And then he goes ahead and puts that one in the storage enclosure, where it was almost equally unlikely to be found. It doesn't—"
"Not exactly, Phil. I don't think anyone put those bones in the enclosure. I think they were there because somebody died there and never left. And I don't think the rest of it was done sometime in the last ten years, I think it was done sometime in the last ten days."
The candle wax odor had seeped into the air from the damp bone now, faint but sickly. The students in the other room had gone. The musty building with its bits and pieces of five thousand years was silent and spooky.
Gideon leaned forward, palms on the table. "Last Sunday night, to be specific."
* * *
"Last Sunday night?" Phil scowled at him. "But that's when they found it!"
"That's right. I think the numbers were put on after they found it, after they called the police. I think somebody came back in the middle of the night and did it."
"You know, you're starting to sound like—"
"I know who I sound like."
Clifford Haddon, on the last evening of his life, the evening before someone murdered him. Babbling about people sneaking back into the enclosure in the dark of the moon, sneaking furtively back to make off with a yellow jasper Amarna head that he and only he had seen. Well, maybe he had seen something—despite there being no evidence of such a head in the collection—and maybe whoever had skulked off with the head had first skulked around inside the enclosure long enough to write those numbers on the bones. And then maybe he'd skulked back to the annex to get rid of the real 4360 by putting the bones in a bag and going out to the old dump site with them—