Dead Men's Hearts (21 page)

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.I 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 artisticlicense, 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 help 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.

“Shwarma
again?” Asila said dryly from her desk just beyond the partition that made an “office” out of his windowless nook on the second floor of the old police building on Shari Bur Said.

Gabra grumbled something in response as he looked at the message slip on his scarred metal desk. How cheeky they were these days, the clerks. Even the old ones, like Asila. There she sat, fat and tawdry, in clothes that were too tight for an overweight woman of forty-five, smoking like a man and full of smart-aleck remarks. Nowadays they learned how to behave from watching “Dallas” on television.

The message asked him to call Major Saleh. He fought down a second burp and punched one of the intercom buttons. Nothing happened. He punched it again.

“It’s broken,” Asila said around her cigarette and over her shoulder.

He shook his head.
It’s broken.
If Egypt ever needed a national motto,
It’s broken
would get his vote. The intercom was broken. The swivel on his chair was broken. The electric typewriter was broken. The fan was broken. The paint to refinish the fly-spotted green walls was broken.

“Does the lift work?”

“At last report.”

“God be praised.” He walked dourly from his cubicle.

Asila looked up at him as he passed and suddenly lifted the corners of her mouth with her fingers to make a smile. “Hey, cheer up,” she said as warmly as her brassy voice would allow. “He won’t eat you.”

He laughed. Ah, she wasn’t such a bad old girl, really, compared to most of them. The best secretary on the floor, if he wanted to be honest about it, if you didn’t care about lousy typing. And after twelve years he ought to be used to her manner. It wasn’t much different from having a second wife on the job. Fawzia watched “Dallas” too.

He gave her gaudily beringed hand a pat. “I’m a pretty tough old bird,” he said with a smile.

“Don’t I know it!” she called after him.

In his third-floor office Major Saleh looked up from his work with a noble expression of devotion to duty and country that almost matched that in the picture of President Mubarak on the wall behind him.

“Ah, Gabra, I have something to delegate to you; something that requires sensitivity and discretion. I think you’ll find it interesting.”

“I’m sure I will, sir,” Gabra said, but he sat down in the leather chair beside the desk with deep misgiving. From long experience he knew better than to expect anything good to come of it when Major Saleh started talking about delegating.

Twenty minutes later he was back in his cubicle with a three-page report from Gideon Oliver in front of him and a set of verbal instructions from Major Saleh. Gabra’s assignment, in a nutshell, was to get this meddlesome and lunatic American busybody, as the major called him, out of their hair. He was to do it without offending Oliver or the other Americans, he was to do it without creating any fuss, and he was, above all, to do it without involving Major Saleh any further. The extremist crisis was growing; another tourist, a Dane this time, had been shot near the main ferry landing the previous evening, and the major’s time and energy could no longer be wasted on fantastic intrigues, imaginary murders, and old skeletons.

But Gabra’s could, of course. Ah, well, he thought philosophically—his stomach had settled and he was feeling more in tune with the world—wasn’t this, after all, the very nature of delegation?

It was as the old proverb said:

Shit falls downward.

TO: Major Yussef Saleh FROM: Gideon Oliver

1. INTRODUCTION

Today I reexamined a set of skeletal remains originally found in an abandoned storage enclosure at Horizon House on November 28. At that time they were mistakenly identified as being those of an archaeological specimen from the institution’s collection, an error in which I concurred in an examination on November 29.

However, a later examination leads me to conclude that these remains are modern, belonging to an individual dead between two and five years.

2. BONES PRESENT

The partial skeleton consists of four ribs, one thoracic and two lumbar vertebrae, the skull (minus the mandible), the right scapula and humerus, the right second and third metacarpals, the first phalanx of the right index finger, the sacrum, both innominates, both femurs, both tibias, and the left fibula. No other bones were recovered.

Gabra yawned and lit up a Cleopatra King. This would be tough going even if his English were up to it.

3. CONDITION

No soft tissue was present. There is moderate environmental erosion and considerable evidence of rodent and canine gnawing, particularly at the long bone ends.

4. TRAUMA AND PROBABLE CAUSE OF DEATH
There is a ten-centimeter antemortem fracture of the

right parietal running diagonally back from the coronal suture. This type of injury is commonly associated with falls. Total absence of healing indicates that death followed shortly after. It is therefore highly probable that cranial damage resulting from a fall was the cause of death. Naturally, other causes of death that might not show in the existing bones cannot be ruled out.