Dead Men's Hearts

by Aaron Elkins

  Reserved at first, she soon became a spirited guide, leading him through the maze of tumbled mud blocks and square pits that made up the Eighteenth Dynasty workers' settlement. Around them diggers both Egyptian and American scraped away with everything from hoes to teaspoons under the sharp eyes of the site supervisors. Students wandered self-consciously around with clipboards or fiddled endlessly with surveyors' tools and tripod-mounted cameras.

  Gideon found it hard to pay attention. His thoughts about TJ, and to a lesser extent Jerry Baroff, had been uneasy since Gabra had told him about the four-year-old theft of the statuette body. That had happened on TJ's watch; she had been the dig supervisor then as now. Yet in all the past week, with everything that had occurred, she had never mentioned it. Why not? How could the possible connection between the body and the head have escaped her of all people? Gabra had seen it in a flash. So had Gideon. So would anybody.

  And why had she so readily—so adamantly—accepted as fact Stacey's determination that there had never been such a head in the collection? It hadn't taken Gideon very long to find sizable room for doubt. He had no good answers for these questions, and he didn't like the direction they had taken him. Somebody at Horizon House was a murderer, but he preferred that it not be TJ, thanks all the same.

  "This building here was shown in Lambert's records as a brewery, but actually it was a butcher shop," she was saying. "You know how we know? It's fascinating: the—"

  "Wasn't there a theft here a few years ago?" It had come blurting out on its own.

  TJ stopped, her arm still extended, her finger still pointing at whatever she'd been pointing at.

  "Did I miss something? What's that got to do with anything?"

  "I understand it was an Amarna statuette."

  "That's right. Just the body." She looked at him quizzically, then took him a few dozen yards to the left, to the neatly excavated remains of a rectangular hut where two Egyptian workmen were protecting the eroded tops of the mud-brick foundations, using paintbrushes to lay on a cementlike goop out of a bucket.

  "It came from here," TJ said. "This was a sculptor's studio. It was probably something he was working on. The bastards were on it like vultures the very same night we found it. Why? What's the sudden interest?"

  He hesitated. "Oh, I was just thinking about the head that Haddon saw and wondering if the two of them—"

  She flung up her hands with a laugh. "Christ, you never give up, do you? Gideon, believe me—truly—there was no head. Haddon was just doing his usual number, trying to cover his poor old rear end. What does it take to satisfy you?"

  More than that, he thought, and yet he was marginally reassured. Conceivably, it was as simple as that—that TJ really, sincerely believed that Haddon had never seen the head, that there wasn't any head to see, that it was first a delusion and then an invention. She hadn't made a connection between the body and the head because she had never for a moment believed the head existed. It was possible, he supposed. He hoped it was true.

  "Come on, I'll show you the rest of the place," she said when he didn't answer, and led him off. She was polite and enthusiastic and Gideon asked intelligent questions, but an edge had come between them again, and he was glad when she looked at her watch, mumbled apologies, and went back to her clipboard and her graduate students.

  On his way back to the sorting area he passed the camera crew on its next-to-last day of shooting. They were taping activities at one of the more interesting excavations, a building that had been a well-equipped bakery, and Kermit was arguing sourly with the local site supervisor because the young man wouldn't let him set up directly on the excavated clay floor. Nearby, restless as a chained bear, Forrest shambled back and forth wearing an oversized Panama hat with a jaunty red band, trying to bite what was left of his nails.

  "Hi, Forrest, how's it going?" Gideon said without thinking.

  He should have known better. "Don't ask," Forrest mumbled and then told him: Half of yesterday's taping was going to have to be reshot because some bozo on the ferry had knocked a box of cassettes into the river the previous evening. Cy was being sulky because Kermit had overruled him on a complex shot that Cy had spent an hour setting up, and Kermit was acting sulky because Forrest had overruled him. Patsy wasn't acting any sulkier than usual but she had diarrhea, which meant they had to stop for ten minutes between every shot while she made a run for the can. The whole thing was coming apart in their faces.

  And Haddon had screwed things up beyond redemption, not to speak ill of the goddamned dead, by picking a hell of a time to fall into the Nile. Corners were going to have to be cut, interviews were going to have to be scratched—

  "Sounds really tough, Forrest. Um, am I still on at noon?" Hope had stirred. Had the director been hinting that Gideon's session would have to be dropped?

  No such luck. "God, yes," Forrest said, shocked, "We need you more than ever. What are you supposed to be talking about?"

  "Racial composition in ancient Egypt," Gideon said reluctantly. "We were going to reshoot the session I was doing with Kermit the other—"

  "No, screw it," Forrest said, scanning his wilting and dog-eared shooting schedule and making a few more smudgy pencil marks on it, "we don't need that, let's forget that one."

  That was something, anyway.

  "How about if instead you do the hour on village life you were going to do tomorrow? That'll give me tomorrow to—"

  "I don't think so, Forrest. I'm not ready. There were some things I was going to look up in the library."

  Forrest gnawed his two-inch-long, much-gnawed stub of yellow pencil. "I could probably switch you from noon to two o'clock. Would that give you enough time? Kermit will have a fit, but, what the hell, screw Kermit too."

  "You mean you wouldn't need me at all tomorrow?"

  "Right, finish it off today."

  Gideon considered. It would rush him, but it would also mean a day with Julie tomorrow, an entire free day on their own, the only one they'd had since coming to Egypt and the only one they were going to get.

  "You're on," he said.

  Which was why he and Julie were now climbing into one of the white Horizon vans to be taken to the ferry dock. The driver, a smiling new hire named Gawdat, slid the side door closed with a clunk, ran around to the front, climbed into the driver's seat, turned the key, and started them up the steeply inclined road.

  They drove past the ruined foundations of what everyone said was the set from an old movie, although no one knew its name, then around the base of Monkey's Spine, the curious, humpbacked knob that loomed over WV-29, and then onto the long escarpment that led to the main road to the Nile. Once on the escarpment, an enormous panorama spread out on their left. They were at the very edge of the great plateau of the Western Desert, riddled with canyons and dropping away, foothill by tawny foothill to the distant Nile, a dull brown band between two narrow strips of green as sharply defined as if they'd been drawn on a map. Beyond the farther strip the desert began its slow climb again, desolate and sterile, and continued far beyond the range of their sight, for almost three thousand terrible miles, the largest desert in the world, across the whole of Libya and Algeria and Morocco...

  "I forgot," Julie said abruptly.

  Gideon turned from the window. "Leave something back there?"

  "No. I forgot all about it. In all the fuss. The ledger." She put her hand on his arm. "Yesterday."

  "Maybe complete sentences would help," he said.

  "I found the chronological ledger," she told him as if he were being particularly dense. "I went looking for it and I found it."

  He sighed. "I think I missed something."

  "You missed the chronological ledger, is what you missed."

  "That's not too surprising. What's a chronological ledger?"

  It was a register, she explained excitedly, in which new accessions to a museum were recorded as they came in, as an adjunct to the object cards. It had occurred to her that there might have been such
a register in Lambert's time, that it might still be around, and that a record of the head that Haddon had described, the head that was at the center of every strange thing that had been going on, might be in it.

  She squeezed his arm. "And it was."

  Gideon shook his head, still bewildered. "Do you mean a field catalogue, a site notebook? But they wouldn't have been using one here in 1924. It wasn't part of the standard archaeological method yet. Cordell Lambert wasn't Howard Carter."

  "I'm not talking about archaeology, I'm talking about museumology." She started rummaging in her duffel-sized canvas purse. "I went into the old office in the annex before dinner yesterday and browsed around. There were some dusty old ledgers down on the oversized shelves."

  "I never saw them."

  "You'd have to be looking for them. They were in there with the bound periodicals. Anyway, they were the Lambert Museum's chronological ledger from 1920 to 1926. Damn, where is that thing? Ah... ."

  She pulled out the soft leather pocket notebook that was always in her purse, the one that he'd given her on her promotion to supervisor so that she would have her own little black book. "Here it is. '21 March, 1924. Head of—' Here, you read it."

  He snatched it from her. " 'Head of young woman or girl, inscribed, made of yellow jasper ...' This is it, Julie!"

  "Really?" she said mildly. "You know, I wondered if it might be."

  He laughed and read on. " 'Height five and one-eighth inches to base of neck, not including one and one-quarter-inch tenon for insertion into mortise joint in shoulders.’” This was it, all right. The head Haddon had seen, the head he'd described. Something like an Ali Hassan—type chuckle rumbled around inside Gideon's chest. " 'Chipped left ear and some abrasion of tip of nose. Slightly elongated skull shape, possibly for mounting of wig.'

  He slapped the notebook against his palm. "Julie, this is great. It confirms everything we—"

  He stopped in mid-sentence, scowled, and tore the notebook open again.

  "Look at this," he said wonderingly. " 'Head of a young woman or girl, inscribed ...’” He slapped his forehead. "Where's my mind been? I should have figured this out days ago, before we ever got back to Luxor!"

  "I'm afraid I've missed something," Julie said. "What is it that we're talking about?"

  "Remember my telling you how Ali Hassan was leering at me and muttering about 'the final element, the last part'?"

  "Yes, but—"

  "I know what it is, I know what he was talking about!" He sobered. "My God, no wonder this thing was worth killing over. If— "

  The van, which had been bobbing timidly along the sandy road the last time they'd noticed, suddenly rocked heavily to the right and went through a jolting series of bumps, throwing Julie against Gideon and knocking the notebook to the floor.

  "Hey, take it easy," Gideon called to the front, "we're not in any hurry, we—"

  Another tooth-rattling set of shocks bounced both of them two inches off the seat. The notebook jumped about on the floor. Everything else on the seats—Julie's purse, their hats, somebody's clipboard, somebody's jacket, a couple of empty soda pop cans— was flung to the floor. In front of them Gawdat hung rigidly on to the wheel with his left hand, fighting to keep his turban from toppling off with his right.

  "What is he doing?" Julie said anxiously. "This can't be the way to the ferry."

  It wasn't the way to anywhere. Two hundred yards in front of them, so bright it hurt to look at, was a squat, rugged cliff of weathered limestone eighty or a hundred feet high, blocking their way like a dam. On either side of the van, but much closer, similar stone walls closed in, craggy and forbidding.

  A box canyon, Gideon thought. He's driven us into a box canyon. What...

  "Gawdat," he said sharply. "Stop the van. Right now. Turn around and—"

  The rest of the sentence was jarred out of his mouth as the van bucketed on. His teeth clicked painfully together. Gawdat turned panicky eyes on him for a moment—Gideon saw white all around the pupils, as in a frightened horse—and stepped on the gas, rigidly clutching the wheel with both hands now while his turban went flying. Julie and Gideon grabbed at whatever they could to keep from being tossed into the air. Limbs flopped, heads knocked against the padded roof.

  "Damn it," Gideon managed to get out, "you're going to—"

  They were thrown forward against the backs of the front seats as the car juddered to a standstill, so that Julie and Gideon wound up falling all over each other in the narrow space, like a pair of Keystone Kops, knees in ribs and elbows in eyes. When they floundered up unhurt, they were in time to see the turbanless Gawdat bolting back across the desert, with the skirts of his robe held high and his brown knees pumping, finally vanishing into a warren of boulders at the entrance to the canyon.

  The springs of the van resettled themselves with a last, abused sigh, and then there was utter silence, unnerving after all the tumult. Around them, pale dust slowly settled back to earth and sifted in through the open windows and driver's door. The odor of gasoline was thick in their nostrils—gasoline and the strange smell of the Egyptian desert; flinty-clean and fusty at the same time, redolent, so it seemed, of ancient tomb chambers, and camel dung, and Bedouin camps that had been set down and pulled up a thousand times over the ages.

  "Well, that was certainly exciting," Julie said, pushing her shirt into her jeans. "What now?"

  Gideon considered. "If there was a phone booth we could use it to call the auto club," he pointed out. "If there was an auto club."

  She gave him the look it deserved and slid to the right end of the seat to scan the barren, silent rock walls through her sunglasses.

  He knew what was on her mind—the same thing that was on his: two days before, two English tourists had been shot to death by extremists in a remote canyon near the Valley of the Kings, only a few miles from where they were now. They had been in a hired van. The driver had mysteriously disappeared.

  But there was something else on his mind too: a new thought, closer to home but no less nasty. Like Julie he searched the clefts and outcroppings, but without his sunglasses—they were back on the bureau at Horizon House, damn it—it was next to hopeless. The clefts were too many, the shadows too deep, the glare on the sun-bleached rock too blinding. He wiped a sheen of sweat from his forehead and pushed the fly-window open as far as it would go. The temperature had dropped to a seasonally normal eighty-five degrees, but under the desert sun the flat-roofed vehicle had begun to heat up the moment they had stopped, even with the driver's door and all the workable windows wide open. Already he was imagining that his tongue had begun to thicken, the back of his throat to turn gluey.

  "What we need," Julie said, continuing to scan the cliffs methodically, side to side, down one face and up the next, "is a plan."

  He laughed. "My sentiments exactly. What do you say—"

  "Look there." She pointed upward and a little behind them. "On top, you see that formation like a—a long set of organ pipes?"

  Gideon squeezed his way past her knees, crouched in the space next to the passenger door, and peered out, shielding his eyes against the blaze of sky and limestone. "Yes... ."

  "Just to the left of that and down a little, there's a kind of hollow—"

  Near his cheek something pulsed in the air, a vibration, a flutter, as of an invisible bird wing; a queer sensation he knew he'd never felt before. At the same time something thudded into the mess on the floor, and a fraction of a second later there was a crack from outside, followed by a diminishing grumble of echoes. Gideon had been half-expecting it, and still it took a blank, shocked moment to register. They were being shot at. Hurriedly, he pulled a similarly stunned Julie roughly away from the window, to the other side of the van.

  "Are you all right?" he asked with his heart in his throat. "It didn't—?"

  She shook her head, her black eyes round. "No... I'm all right. "I think it went between us."

  And without much room to spare, he thought shakily. T
hrough the open window with about four inches on either side.

  She was still staring at him. "I saw him," she whispered. "I saw his face! I saw the gun—I couldn't believe he was really going to shoot at us. Gideon, it's—"

  "I know. Forrest Freeman."

  "Yes! You saw him too?"

  No, he hadn't seen him, but he knew. It was Forrest who had the head, Forrest who had killed Haddon, Forrest who was up there now with a rifle—his trusty Anatolian boar-hunting rifle, no doubt—bent on killing them.

  "You knew!" she said with a flare of exasperation. "How long have you—"

  "About a minute and a half. Julie, I'd say this would be a good time to come up with that plan. We can't just wait here for him to come and get us."

  "Agreed."

  Their eyes roved over the interior of the van. What they were looking for, Gideon hardly knew, but something—a decoy, a trap, a weapon... In the space behind the rear row of seats he found a jack, the handle of which was an angled tire iron about fifteen inches long. He pulled the iron out of the jack and hefted it. It would make a formidable club but how much help it was going to be against a rifleman shooting at them from behind a rock eighty feet above their heads was—

  "I don't believe it!" Julie exclaimed. "The key!"

  He followed the line of her pointing finger and there—amazingly, wondrously—was the ignition key, trailing a six-inch piece of wood with a red enamel 2 painted on it, fixed firmly in the ignition slot. In his agitation Gawdat had either been unable to get it out or had forgotten about it altogether.

  They looked at each other. They had a plan after all: they could drive out of the box canyon.

  "Okay, then—" he said.

  The small, unopenable window in the passenger door exploded, scattering glass shards. A thread of dust puffed from the seat, exactly where Julie had been sitting moments before. For a couple of seconds they sat wordlessly, not moving, anticipating another bullet, but none came; only the single, desultory shot, as if Forrest merely wanted to let them know that he hadn't lost interest.