Dead Men's Hearts

by Aaron Elkins

  "Help, wait, you're losing me," Phil said. "Why would he bury the real one?"

  "Why? So that the next morning in the enclosure, when everybody saw those surprising numbers on the bones and ran back to the annex to check, they'd find, what do you know, that the box that they belonged in was really empty. So in went the supposedly traveling remains of 4360, and that was that. Everything accounted for, no more embarrassing questions about the skeleton in the enclosure, no loose ends, case closed."

  "No, wait, that can't be. There must be an inventory of the individual bones that are supposed to be in each storage box, so they'd know if they didn't match... they wouldn't?"

  "They wouldn't. No inventory. We're talking about the late, unlamented golden age of Egyptology here. Flinders Petrie's influence was yet to be felt at Horizon House."

  Phil, wandering contemplatively around the room, found an old, wheeled office chair, sank into it, and shoved himself up against the wall with his feet. "Whew. Is this the kind of thing you usually do for a living?"

  "No," Gideon said. "Thank God."

  "Gideon, you realize what you're implying, don't you? If it really happened last Sunday—"

  "It pretty much had to, Phil. Everything about this says it was a rush job. Whoever did it was under heavy time pressure. And he couldn't just come back during the night and get rid of those bones because they'd already been seen by Haddon and the others, right? It would raise all kinds of questions. So he came up with this wild scheme to thoroughly confuse the issue."

  "Which he has, with enormous success."

  "Whereas if he'd had some time at his disposal he wouldn't have had to go through this complicated rigmarole, he could have come back and gotten rid of the skeleton in the enclosure anytime, long before it was found. He could have carted it off and dumped it in the Nile or buried it fifty miles from here, out in the desert somewhere."

  "Why didn't he, then? If what you're saying is so, they'd been lying there for years."

  It was a good question. "Beats me," Gideon said. He sat on a corner of the table, arms folded. "But obviously he didn't."

  Phil was tipped back in the pivoting chair, hands behind his head, leaning against the wall. "Well, if you're right about it, it means it had to be one of the people who went out to look at them the night before: TJ, Jerry, or Arlo."

  "Or Haddon himself, if we want to cover all the bases, or Ragheb—"

  "True, but let's try to keep this reasonably realistic," Phil said. "Arlo, Jerry, and TJ—no, not Jerry. If he buried those bones he'd hardly have gone ahead and had them dug back up."

  "But that digging was going on because Haddon ordered it," Gideon said. "Conceivably, Jerry figured the best thing to do was to let it go on so he didn't call attention to himself."

  "That could be," Phil agreed. "So: Arlo, TJ, and Jerry." He mulled this over.

  "Yes, I guess so," Gideon said. He gave the matter some thought too, staring abstractedly out the windows. The room faced the back of the compound, away from the shaded paths, away from the city. He looked out at desert and the shimmer of heat. In the far corner of the compound the backhoe was still at work, with Jerry supervising from under a table umbrella. Beyond the compound fence, a few miles farther off, mirages shimmered like pools of quicksilver in the hollows of the brown hills.

  "But right now," Gideon said at last, "what I'd love to know is who these bones belonged to. It has to be someone who disappeared in the time span we're talking about—the last three, four, five years. There have to be missing-persons records at the police department. I wonder if—"

  "Why is it so important to know who it is? What's that going to tell you?"

  "I was thinking it might provide a lead on who murdered him," Gideon said. "Which might provide a lead on who murdered Haddon."

  Phil came away from the wall. "Hold on a minute. Now you're telling me this guy was murdered too?"

  "It's starting to look like it."

  "I thought you said he died from a fall," Phil said reproachfully. "Everybody seems to be under the impression that's what you said last week."

  "That's what I still say. He's got exactly the kind of linear fracture you expect from a relatively low-velocity impact against pavement or tiles. Not a twenty-foot tumble like Haddon, just a simple, ground-level fall."

  "So what's so sinister about a simple, ground-level fall? Why did someone have to kill him? People trip over things, you know."

  "What's sinister is what happened later. If it was just an innocent fall, why did someone go to the rather extreme trouble—and extreme risk—of writing phony numbers on his bones to cover it up? Why did someone take the other skeleton out of the box and bury it?"

  Phil nodded slowly. "Yes, I see what you mean." A flicker of excitement lit up his face. "You know, I could do some asking around about missing people at the city offices; a little bakshish goes a long way. If we could establish a connection between this character and—"

  "If the police could establish a connection," Gideon said, heading him off before he got up a full head of steam. A moment later, a little doubtfully, he said: "Phil, when I tell the police about this they will have to act, won't they? It's got to be related to what happened to Haddon. They couldn't just ignore this thing too."

  "Gideon, I'm sorry to be the one to keep telling you this, but they can do whatever they damn well please."

  "But that's—"

  "On the other hand," he admitted, "the Luxor police aren't the river and tourist police. These people are serious cops, more independent, so you might have better luck. Go ahead, give them a call; it can't hurt. Would you like me to do it for you?"

  "Would you? Just ask them to send somebody over so I can show them. I'll be here for a while yet."

  Phil nodded. He got up and took a last look at the bone-laden table.

  "Well, what was he, then? If not a scribe."

  Another good question, one that Gideon himself hadn't gotten around to thinking about yet. The first time he'd seen the remains he'd been misled because he had started with preconceptions about them. That was a lesson that never seemed to take no matter how many times he learned it, but the markers that had led him astray—that had let him lead himself astray—were real enough: the roughened ischial tuberosities of the pelvis, the pronounced ligament-attachment area on the finger bone, the bowed fibula.

  In Fifth Dynasty Thebes they added up to scribe. But Thebes was long gone, and so the question was: what did they add up to in twentieth-century Luxor? What habitual, modern modes of behavior could mold the bone in these particular ways? And what other signs were there in the bumps and ridges and hollows of the bones that might provide clues as to how this mysterious man, so bizarrely misidentified in death, had lived his life? He didn't doubt that he had missed some during his brief, groggy examination the other night.

  "I don't know," he said.

  "Are you going to be able to tell?"

  He shrugged. "Could be."

  It was the kind of problem he loved, the essential question that was at the heart of every analysis of every paper sack or cardboard box or body bag of bones that had been made by every physical anthropologist since the field had begun: who and what was this person?

  He had been getting a little tired, but now he could feel the energy begin to flow again. He was ready for another hour or two with the bones, but on his own. He needed to go at things at his own pace and in his own uneven, doubling-back way, without having to explain every step and every partial conclusion. He wanted time, solitary and leisurely...

  Phil was still standing at the table, showing no signs of leaving.

  "Phil ..."

  "I know, I know. I'm going. I've seen that look before." He headed for the door. "If you don't show up at lunch I'll bring over a sandwich."

  Gideon was already bent over the bones, fingering, hefting, comparing. "Hm?"

  "Bye," said Phil.

  Chapter Sixteen

  He had no formulas or tables to work from, but
he did find a pair of spreading calipers and a steel tape measure in the other workroom, and those would get him by. For an hour he made steady progress, interrupted only by the return of Phil at noon with two chicken-salad sandwiches and a bottle of Thumbs-Up Cola. The Luxor police had been contacted and had promised to respond with dispatch, he said. They had even sounded as if they meant it.

  At 1:30, still hunched over the worktable, he had just gotten to the sandwiches when Mrs. Ebeid, Horizon House's administrative assistant, appeared. A meticulous woman of earnest propriety, she had commandeered Gideon and Julie for half an hour almost the moment they'd arrived to impress on them the sacrosanct and inviolable rules of Horizon House residence: towel allotments, linens, eating times, no food in the rooms, make your own bed, no air conditioner unless the temperature reached a hundred degrees.

  "You didn't hear the telephone ring?"

  Gideon, caught in mid-thought and mid-bite, looked up. "What?"

  She eyed him. "You didn't hear the telephone ring?"

  "No. Yes, maybe. It was in another room. I didn't think it was for me."

  Mrs. Ebeid's nose quivered. She had picked up the smell of the still-moist femur. She looked down at what he was doing and took a step backward, apparently unused to seeing someone with a human fibula in one hand and a chicken-salad sandwich in the other.

  Possibly it was against the Horizon House rules. "Was it for me?" he asked. Delicately, he placed the fibula on the table.

  Mrs. Ebeid remained at her new distance, which made him twist to look at her. "It was. Major Saleh of the police. He is most anxious to speak with you."

  "Well, I'm anxious to speak with him. How do I get hold of him?"

  She handed him a slip of paper with the telephone number, leveled one more unappreciative glance at his work and/or his lunch, and made her exit.

  * * *

  Gideon had heard war stories from Phil about the misdirected calls, long waits, and generally horrible state of the Egyptian telephone system, but apparently they didn't apply to lines that went to the police department because he had gotten through to Saleh with satisfactory speed—on the second try, in fact—and the phone had been picked up on the first ring.

  But the major's attitude proved to be less satisfactory. He began with condolences on Haddon's death, but Gideon had barely gotten to the skeletons when Saleh interrupted with an indulgent laugh.

  "Let us go back a few days and look at this from the beginning, Professor. A human skeleton is discovered at Horizon House. How sinister! To the American mind, what can it be but murder? The police are called. An investigation is launched. And the result? Not murder at all, but an innocent museum piece many thousands of years old that had strayed a few feet from its place. The police file is closed."

  It wasn't looking good. Saleh sounded just like el-Basset: important, dismissive, preoccupied, and wholly disinclined to take him seriously.

  "Major—"

  "An eminent American professor appears on the scene," Saleh continued over Gideon's voice, "and deduces that the bones are those of an ancient scribe." He paused to let this sink in. "That is correct, is it not?"

  Yes, damn it, it was correct. How did Saleh know about it? "I made a mistake," Gideon grumbled.

  "A few days later," Saleh went on, "another skeleton is discovered. The professor rethinks his earlier conclusions. The new skeleton is the migrating museum piece; the other one is not ancient after all, but that of a modern—"

  "Major, it's not a matter of rethinking. There's evidence." He explained—briefly; he could sense Saleh's attention wandering— about the writing on the bones, about the coloring, about the smell, the taste—

  "But all these things," Saleh interrupted again, "are, forgive me, matters of opinion? With no way to prove?"

  "No, that's not so. Bones can be tested for age: fluorine level, nitrogen content, pH level—"

  "And you can do these tests here?"

  "Well, no."

  "Well, neither can I."

  Clunk.

  Gideon tried again. "I think we have something more important here than how old the bones are, Major. I think we have a murder."

  "Murder in the reign of Userkaf or murder now?" Saleh said pleasantly.

  Gideon didn't like it, but he swallowed it. As calmly as he could, he explained, but he could hear Saleh engaged, sotto voce, in another conversation.

  "Yes, well," Saleh said, interrupting him yet again, "we will certainly look into this."

  Gideon was not cheered. "And there's something else," he said rapidly, trying to keep Saleh from hanging up. "I think Dr. Haddon's death may not have been an accident."

  "Yes, I spoke to General el-Basset yesterday. He was quite impressed with your theories."

  Gideon gritted his teeth and plowed ahead against the odds. "Those antemortem abrasions on his face—"

  "Professor Oliver? Perhaps it would be better to consider one murder at a time?"

  "Look, Major," Gideon snapped, "as far as I'm concerned, if you don't care about letting murderers run around loose, then the hell with it, do what you want. It's your country."

  It was hardly the way to bring Saleh around, but by now Gideon was feeling patronized and thoroughly surly. It did him good to let off some steam.

  Saleh let a moment pass, then surprised him. "Would it be possible for you to put your findings into a report?" As if Gideon hadn't just finished jumping down his throat.

  It took him a moment to shift gears. "You want me to write them up?"

  "If it would cause no difficulty."

  "I'd be glad to." Was this progress? Had he shamed Saleh into action?

  "And if I sent someone to pick it up at, say, four o'clock, it might be ready?"

  "It'll be ready."

  * * *

  After he hung up Gideon took a walk to get his blood going again—he'd been cooped up with the bones for three hours—but was driven back by the sun into the relative coolness of the high-ceilinged annex. From the main house buffet he brought back a glass of blessedly sugarless iced coffee to sip while he stared moodily at the bones of the unknown man who'd breathed his last in the enclosure perhaps five years ago. He wasn't sure whether he'd gotten a brush-off from Saleh or not, but the major would get his report. And that would have to be that, however Gideon felt about it. He didn't see any way to fight the entire Egyptian bureaucracy, and solving crimes without the police was Phil's approach to things, not his.

  The basic skeletal work had been done: sexing, aging, racing, stature estimation (that had taken a call to a Cambridge colleague for the Trotter-Gleser multiple regression formulas), and so on. And, of course, the probable cause of death. All in all, he'd pulled a fair amount of information from this chewed-up cluster of scraps, but he had yet to come up with what he wanted most: an alternative explanation for the assemblage of traits that so perfectly mimicked the pattern that went along with a life as a scribe. What had he been or done? What habitual patterns of behavior had left that distinctive and unusual record in his skeleton?

  He separated the offending bones and laid them out in front of him: the innominates with their roughened ischial tuberosities; the bowed fibula; the finger bone with its marked ligament-attachment lines. To them he added a metacarpal that also had some unusually prominent areas of ligament attachment, and one other oddity that had puzzled him from the beginning: the skull with its unusual tooth wear pattern: incisors worn down almost to nubs, while the molars showed only moderate wear. Humans did their chewing with their back teeth; if you were going to get extensive attrition anywhere, it ought to be on the molars.

  It was the second time he had looked at them all in a row like this, and once again he had the feeling that the answer was there, right in front of him, just out of reach. In finger-snapping distance, so to speak.

  It was possible, of course, that there was no single explanation, that each trait had a separate, unrelated cause, but he couldn't make himself quite believe that. There was a configuratio
n here, a constellation that taken as a whole made sense if he could only comprehend it. For the dozenth time he picked up the fibula, the phalanx, the inominate. He fingered them, turned them over, put them down. He sat on a high stool, his heels hooked over the rungs, and chewed ice from the coffee. He picked them up again.

  Five minutes later he snapped his fingers.

  * * *

  At 4:10, a police constable with smudged glasses and only a few words of English came to get the report, which Gideon had typed on a forty-year-old Remington he'd found in a dusty office. After considerable protest and two calls to police headquarters the constable reluctantly agreed to take away the skeletal material, which Gideon felt would be better off in the police vault than lying around Horizon House, prey to who knows what new drollery.

  Once the constable had left with his unwelcome burden, Gideon washed up and went to the other workroom, where some of the students had regathered to number pottery and gossip some more about Haddon's death.

  "Excuse me, is one of you Stacey?"

  A young black woman with a scarf around her head looked up from the row of potsherds on the table in front of her.

  "I am."

  "Stacey," Gideon said, "do you suppose I could have a few minutes of your time?"

  Chapter Seventeen

  "Welcome in Egypt! Where you want to go?"

  As soon as they'd stepped through the Horizon House gate they had flagged down (or rather been flagged down by) one of the string of caleche drivers who lounged along the curb polishing the tin decorations on their carriages, chatting with each other, and smoking cigarettes.