by Aaron Elkins
"Shari Tahrir," Phil told him, heaving himself up to ride shotgun beside the driver while Julie and Gideon climbed into the hansom's regal passenger seats.
They had had predinner gin-and-tonics in Phil's room, where the window fan was marginally better (if noisier) than their own, and infinitely superior to the gurgling, rattling, next-to-useless air-conditioning that had been turned on in the main house the instant the temperature had hit a hundred degrees.
Julie, who had spent the day putting in volunteer labor at WV-29, TJ's dig across the river, had needed to be filled in on things, and an hour's discussion of Horizon House foul play, past and present, had left all three without much inclination to have dinner with the others in the dining room. (Please pass the salt. Hm, I wonder if be/she is the one who bumped off Clifford Haddon.) At the same time, they were sensing some reciprocal discomfort on the part of the others, as if their suspicions and Gideon's continued contact with the police were general knowledge, which they probably were.
That being the case, Phil suggested that they go "grazing" at some of his new On the Cheap finds—where the real people ate, and at no more than five dollars a head, tips included.
"But no lamb's eyeballs, agreed?" Gideon said now, as the driver set the well-decorated but swaybacked horse more or less in motion. "No fatted sheep's tails."
Phil turned in his seat to gaze pityingly down on him. "Julie, when did this man get to be such a wimp?"
"I can tell you exactly when," Gideon said. "Two years ago, in Madrid, when you took me to the tapas bars where the 'real' people went. A distinguishing characteristic of real people," he said to Julie, "seems to be a proclivity to be a little careless about waste disposal. We were up to our knees in shrimp crania, fish bones, and spit all night long."
Julie laughed. "Do shrimp have crania?"
"Sure they have crania. And they crackle when you step on them."
"But what about the tapas?" Phil asked. "Good or not good?"
"Not bad," admitted Gideon.
"Well, I suppose that was a fairly rough crowd," Phil admitted in his turn, "but nothing like that tonight. You may put your faith in me. We won't go anywhere that I wouldn't recommend to my readers."
"That's what worries me," Gideon said.
The driver, who had been waiting for a pause in the conversation, joined in with a dazzling smile. "I, Gamal. Horse, Napoleon. You go souks? You want to buy Egyptian rug, Egyptian hat? I show you best place, no extra charge."
Phil murmured a few fluid sentences in Arabic. Gamal, after registering his amazement, haughtily ignored them and gave his attention to nudging Napoleon along at a dignified pace befitting both its name and the weather. At a little after 6 p.m. the sun's rays were no longer searing anything they hit, but the evening breeze off the Nile had yet to spring up and the temperature was still an unseasonably warm hundred degrees. The feeble stir of air created by Napoleon's ambling along was welcome.
They drove into central Luxor on the jammed Corniche and were soon towered over by smog-belching trucks and sleek tourist buses with sinister black windows. Bicyclists darted death-defyingly around and between motor vehicles. Automobile-tired carts of vegetables dragged by slow, weary donkeys set off long fits of hysterical horn-blowing in their wakes, to which their nodding drivers, probably dreaming of the dinners awaiting them in their villages, seemed totally oblivious.
Gamal did what he could to add to the bedlam, frequently standing up to brandish his whip and berate truck and bus drivers, who replied with tooth-rattling air-horn blasts that detonated lively, long-lasting chain reactions in every direction. Bicyclists and pedestrians were hissed and screamed at by Gamal, who replied in kind.
Evening traffic, Gideon had noticed, was no thicker than morning traffic, but always a good deal crazier. Egypt in general seemed to be at its most relaxed in the morning, to undergo a steady increase in nervous tension through the day, and to be at its peak of frenzy in the evening. Phil's theory was that it was a combination of the steadily building heat, the ordinary frustrations of city life, and the cumulative effect of all those potent little cups of coffee the Arab world consumed, uncountered by the decompressing influence of alcohol in the form of the gin-and-tonics that European visitors were gasping for by late afternoon.
Just north of Luxor Temple they turned from the choked Corniche onto a crooked, shop-lined street not much wider than the caleche itself. Within two blocks they had left most of the traffic and nine-tenths of the tourists behind. "Pharaonic art," decorated papyrus mats, and painted heads of Nefertiti were gone from the shop windows, along with signs in French and English. The very shops and windows themselves had disappeared, to be replaced by a warren of open-air stalls—souks—with their wooden shutters folded aside to let in the breeze—and let out the aromas. The warm air was heavy with the ancient fragrances of the Oriental bazaar: coriander, saffron, cinnamon, ginger, roasting lamb, baking bread.
Julie sat up and sniffed like a dog that hears its bowl rattled. "I'm starving. Aren't we ever going to eat?"
"Right now," Phil said. "Here," he told the driver.
But Gamal couldn't bring himself to let a good thing go without one more try. "No, no, I know much better place. More good prices, nicer peoples."
"Here," Phil said firmly.
Comforted by a substantial tip, Gamal capitulated and dropped them off near a blue donkey cart set up soup-kitchen style, with a perspiring old man and a young boy standing in a cloud of steam behind two dented, blackened kettles. There they ladled out bowls of stew to a crowd of men clutching grimy one-pound notes and an occasional woman hardy enough to elbow her way through the mob.
"Madame, monsieur, les hors d'oeuvres," Phil announced. "Here we have the stand of Mr. Farag Shash, famous among those in the know. The best fuul in Luxor."
It was certainly the most popular. There were twenty people clustered around the wagon, with others taking the place of everyone who left with a filled bowl. Diners sat at seven or eight newspaper-covered folding picnic tables set up helter-skelter in the street, lapping it up and hissing for more, which was delivered by a second teenager in a stained galabiya who poured it out of a spouted metal jug. Others ate leaning against walls or simply standing up. It took Gideon, Julie, and Phil five minutes to work their way to the front of the crowd, plunk down their pound notes—about thirty cents—and then fight their way, spoons and bowls in hand, back out through the hungry gaggle around the cart.
"Whew," Julie said.
"I heard Bea grumbling the other day about how much better the Egyptians would get along in life if only they learned to stand in line," Phil said.
"Bea has a point," Gideon said. "Pardon my cultural absolutism."
Phil shook his head. "It's a good thing he likes bones," he said to Julie. "He'd never have made it as a cultural anthropologist."
They were lucky in getting a just-vacated table with three chairs, under a red, white, and green umbrella that proclaimed Corona Extra, La Cerveza Más Fina. The sheets of newspaper on the table hadn't been changed for a while, but the stew smelled wonderful, the setting was agreeably exotic, and Gideon was glad to be just where he was, doing just what he was doing, with just the people he was with. Fuul was the nearest thing to a national dish that Egypt had; a paste of mashed fava beans prepared in a hundred different ways. Gideon had tried a good dozen and had liked most of them, but he was ready to agree that Mr. Shash's version won hands-down.
For several minutes they ate in animated silence, wolfing down the mixture of beans, garlic, onions, oil, and spices. When they had eaten enough to slow down a little, Julie spoke pensively, having ruminated on their earlier discussion for an hour.
"So now we have two murders: Dr. Haddon and an unknown Egyptian—both of them, we think, having something to do with an Amarna head seen by Dr. Haddon, except that he never saw it because it was never there."
"Well, I've been giving that some thought," Gideon said. "I think it was there."
Ph
il looked up from his bowl. "There in the enclosure or there in the drawer?"
"Both, just the way he said. Think about it: why would he give us a detailed description—yellow jasper, five inches high, dug in 1924—of something that wasn't there? If he was trying to save face, wouldn't he have described one that was there, so he could show it to us when we got back to Luxor? Why would he go out of his way to promise to show us something that he knew wasn't going to be there to show?"
Phil considered. "How do you explain it, then?"
"Easy," Gideon said. "Haddon did see it in the enclosure, and later he saw it in the drawer, exactly as he said, because someone took it out of the enclosure and put it there. And then, afterward, someone—probably the same someone—came along and took it out of the drawer and put it someplace else."
"And why would this someone be doing these curious things?"
"I think it went into the drawer because that was where it belonged; it was a perfect place to 'hide' it as long as no one was looking for it. I think it was taken out of the drawer when Haddon started talking about having seen it and getting people excited."
Julie shook her head. "But I thought one of TJ's students checked and found out there was no record of it in the collection. Do you mean she was lying?"
"Stacey Tolliver, you mean. No, I'm pretty sure she was telling the truth."
"Well, then, if there was no such head in the collection—"
"But I think there was."
"This is getting pretty deep," Phil said.
No, it was ridiculously simple, Gideon told them. He'd spent some time with Stacey that afternoon in the old Lambert Museum office, looking at the way they kept their records. What he found was an ancient sixteen-drawer card file—the kind with curled brass pulls on the drawers—in which there were "object cards" for all the items in the collection. Each three-by-five-inch card consisted of a description of the item and its catalogue number, which was also painted on the object itself. The number 24.1 would mean that the item was the first object collected in 1924; 24.500 would be the five-hundredth.
"Sure, that's a fairly standard system," Julie said; she had administered two small museums for the Park Service and had kept up her interest in the field. "We use it in the Service."
"The difference being," Gideon said, "that yours is on computer. This one's on handwritten three-by-five cards that have a hole in the bottom for a metal rod that keeps them in place."
"Fascinating," Phil remarked to Julie, "and don't you just bet it's relevant?"
"It's relevant, all right," Gideon said. "All you'd have to do if you wanted to steal something and make it look as if it'd never been there would be to walk away with the object itself, and then stroll over to the card file and pull out the object card. That's it. There isn't any other record. And that's exactly what somebody did. Well, I think so; I'm ninety-nine percent sure."
Julie smiled as she spooned up the last of her fuul. "Only ninety-nine percent? Isn't that a little tentative for you?"
"Not anymore. I've learned my lesson. Considering the way I cleverly determined that a man killed five or so years ago was a four-thousand-year-old scribe, I thought maybe I ought to exercise a little more restraint in my deductions."
"But there's a problem," Phil said. "If you removed the object card, there'd be a gap in the numbering system."
"Sure, but it wouldn't matter. There are hundreds of gaps in the numbering system already. Every time they gave something away to another institution the card was just tossed."
"Mmm," Phil said doubtfully, concluding the subject for the moment. "Everybody done? Time to move on. We still have four and a half dollars to go."
After stand-up stops for thick, unflavored yogurt, pickled vegetables, and tahina—sesame paste—with fried bread chips, Phil led them to a koshari shop, a clean, plain, indoor restaurant. At the door they handed over fifty piasters—sixteen cents—and were given deep bowls, which they gave in turn to a bucket-brigade line of servers behind a counter. A layer of pasta was shoveled into the bottom of each bowl, then scoops of lentils, rice, tomato sauce, and fried onions. Another fifty piasters got them each a plateful of pita bread and a plastic bottle of Baraka mineral water.
They found a free end of a wobbly wooden table and joined a group of Egyptian men who paid them no attention but went on steadily and singlemindedly getting koshari into themselves, a few with forks, most with fingers and bread. The three Americans went at it with their forks, but with diminished enthusiasm; it was tasty but this was their fifth stop.
"No, no, no, no," Phil said pushing lentils around in his bowl, "it couldn't be as easy as you said. No museum, even in those days, would have been idiotic enough to have a system that easy to fool. There must be some backup, some—"
"Actually, Phil, there are museums that still do it that way," Julie said. She put down her fork. "There was a case only a few years ago where just the kind of thing Gideon is talking about happened. Somebody stole an Egyptian pectoral from a museum in Philadelphia. They also took the object card. This was in the early 1980s as far as anybody can tell, but it might have been even earlier. The thing is, without the card nobody had any idea it was missing until ten years later, and that was only because it showed up in another museum and it looked sort of familiar to someone.
"There you are, then," Gideon said. "It could have been done. I think it was done. The question is: why? According to Haddon, it was a run-of-the-mill piece, not that valuable."
Phil looked soberly at Julie. "Something tells me he's been giving this some thought too."
Gideon smiled. "You know what a composite statue is?
Phil nodded. "Where different parts of it are made from different kinds of stone. The Romans did it."
"The Egyptians did it too," Gideon said, "but only in the Amarna Period. Usually, the head—and sometimes the hands and feet—would be one kind of stone, and the body another. As it happens, yellow jasper was one of the kinds used for the heads. As it also happens, although there are a fair number of heads and a fair number of bodies around, complete statues—the right body with the right head—are extremely rare. And extremely valuable... even with run-of-the-mill carving. Get it to the right buyer, and it'd be worth—well, maybe millions. So I was thinking—"
"That there's a body that goes along with that head," Phil said, "and somebody knows where it is. Or already has it."
"Exactly."
"Or could it be right there in the collection?" Julie suggested.
Gideon shook his head. "No, I went ahead and checked through everything, and there are only two partial bodies, neither of which could possibly go with the head.
"How can you know that?" Phil asked. "You haven't seen the head."
"Well, no, but Haddon said it was five inches from the crown to the base of the neck, so applying normal body ratios, and giving a little leeway to Eighteenth Dynasty artistic license, I figured that the body, from shoulders down, would be around twenty or twenty-two inches, and there's nothing close. But then, why should it still be there? It could have been stolen just the way the head was stolen. So the next question is—"
Julie was regarding him skeptically, her head cocked, the flat of her fork against her lip.
"Julie, do I take it you're not buying this?"
"Well, this is usually your line, Gideon, but may I respectfully point out that you are hypothesizing somewhat in advance of the facts? We still don't know that the head—let alone this body you've now conjured up—was stolen, or even that it was ever there. Simply because something could have been done doesn't mean it was."
Gideon looked at her. "Good God, I've created a monster."
"But I'm right, aren't I?"
Gideon sighed. "Yes, of course you're right. We don't know." He scowled at his half-finished mineral water, his enthusiasm draining away. "And if we did, what would we do about it anyway?"
Phil had a final forkful of koshari and pushed his bowl away. "Well, now, I just might be able to hel
p in that regard. Things get around, you know. I could ask around, talk to some of my, ah, shadier Luxor friends, see if they've heard any rumors about an Amarna head coming on the underground market in the last few days. It couldn't do any harm."
Julie's eyes widened. "You have friends who would know things like that?"
"Real people," Gideon said.
"People who hear what's going on," Phil said. "Luxor seems like a big city, but if you separate out the tourist trade it's simply an overgrown village full of families who've known one another for decades or even centuries. There aren't many secrets."
Gideon folded his arms gloomily. "But what's the point? If I can't get the Egyptian cops interested in two murders, why should they get excited about a piece of an old statue?"
"Never mind the criminal police," Phil said warmly. "What if we can get the antiquities people interested? They carry a lot of weight with the government. Let them put pressure on Saleh to do something."
Gideon took a slow sip of warm mineral water. "It's a thought."
"It's a thought to forget," Julie said. "Or don't you remember that Clifford Haddon's been murdered over this? Stay out of it, Phil; this isn't a game."
"That's good advice, Phil," Gideon said soberly. "Talking to the police is one thing. But stay away from the bad guys."
"Is everyone ready for dessert?" Phil asked brightly. "I know a marvelous place for mint tea and muhalabiya."
Chapter Eighteen
Sergeant Monir Gabra dislodged the last stubborn shred of lamb from between his teeth, dropped the toothpick into his wastepaper basket, and sank with a grimace into his chair. Shwarma—people were beginning to call it gyros now, in the Greek fashion—didn't agree with him the way it once did. It was the fat, he supposed. The older you got, the harder it was to digest, and it was certainly true that he wasn't getting any younger. He was going to have to stop going out to the stands for hurried lunches. His stomach couldn't take it anymore. And look at that paunch. Pretty soon Fawzia was going to have to make him lunches of sandweeches and put them in paper sacks the way she did for the children. He put a hand to his chest and burped softly, painfully.