Dead Men's Hearts

Gideon smiled. “You mean the subject’s always the same?”

“Uh-uh, lucky guess. Sometimes it’s the Co-regency. I don’t know, tonight just felt like Middle Egyptian.” He pointed the bit of his pipe at them. “Verb forms, am I right?”

“Right on,” TJ said, laughing. “Right up until Bruno brought up the bones, and then it was ‘Good night, ladies.” “

“What was that all about?” Gideon said. “I didn’t have a chance to ask.”

“Good God, it’d take all night to tell,” Arlo said. “You must be falling off your feet.”

“Not really,” he said truthfully. “I’m dragging, all right, but I’m not sleepy.”

Jerry hooked a skinny ankle around another chair and pulled it toward Gideon. “Have a seat, then.” He got up in loosely coordinated segments and brought another one for TJ. Arlo, who seemed torn between staying and leaving, finally sat down too, but on the edge of the chair, prepared to leave at any moment.

Gideon was happy to stay outdoors for a while longer. Their room was on the musty side, and Julie would be profoundly, unwakeably asleep anyway. Out here the night air was fragrant with flower blossoms and pipe tobacco, the breeze soft, the purling of the fountain timeless and serene. The thick stucco walls surrounding the patio softened the steady traffic noises.

TJ flopped into her chair and swung a knee over the armrest. “Okay, we’ve got this Fifth Dynasty skeletal collection that we keep in the museum…”

Ten minutes later, with occasional help from Arlo and Jerry, she’d finished.

“That’s strange, all right,” Gideon said. “But you know, people are always stealing stuff from skeletal collections. They make good souvenirs, I guess.”

“And dumping them in the trash fifty yards away?” she asked.

“Well, that part’s funny,” he agreed. After a moment he said: “Was there anything special about this particular skeleton?”

TJ shrugged. “Not that I could see. I think it’s a male, but that’s about all I could… I don’t suppose you’d like to take a look, would you? You could do it now. It’d only take a minute.” Gideon smiled, more wide awake than he’d been for hours.

“Let’s go.”

“I’ll come too,” Jerry said. “What do you say, Arlo?” Arlo raised his hands. “Spare me,” he said with feeling.

“I’ve done all the looking at bones I care to for some time to come, thank you. They’re all yours.”

Chapter Seven

In roughly anatomical position, under ferociously bright fluorescent lights, on a scarred, rimmed, metal table, they lay where Gideon had placed them: a skull, both femurs, both tibias, one fibula, three vertebrae, four ribs, a right scapula and humerus, and the bones of the pelvic girdle. Some, according to TJ and Jerry, had been attached when discovered, but handling since then had disarticulated them. A handful of smaller bones had been pushed to a corner of the table as being from rodents; all except a couple of metacarpals and the first phalanx of the right index finger, which were anatomically placed with the others.

These, Gideon thought, looking down at them, are my kind of bones: ancient, brown, desiccated. Archaeological, not forensic. Nothing wet, nothing smelly, nothing nasty. And from a man so remote in time that it would have been affectation to talk with sadness or solemnity about his death. But not so remote that the bones didn’t form a link back to him. Gideon ran a hand down the smooth, flat surface of a tibia and thought, with a feeling that would have been hard to describe, although he’d had it often enough: I am touching a man who ate, and walked, and laughed, and made love in the Bronze Age, a thousand years before King Solomon, two thousand years and more before Julius Caesar and Jesus Christ.

“You said he’s from about 2400 B.C.?” he asked.

“That’s right,” TJ said, “Fifth Dynasty. Four thousand, four hundred years ago.”

“Four thousand, four hundred and seven, if you want to be exact,” Jerry said.

TJ looked at him. “Now how in the world would you know that?”

“Because,” Jerry said, “I remember you telling me when we first started here that the el-Fuqani material was 4,400 years old. And that was seven years ago. So…”

They all laughed. “Well,” Gideon said, “then we know that 4,407 years ago, our friend here got himself done in by a nasty crack on the head.” He patted a narrow, four-inch-long fracture in the right parietal, running diagonally forward and down to the coronal suture.

The others craned forward. “This little crack killed him?” Jerry asked.

“That’s the way it can be with brain injuries and subdural hematomas.”

“Subdural whats?”

“Hematomas. Internal effusions of blood. Leading cause of death in head injuries. Sometimes there’s no visible damage to the skull at all.”

“Yeah, but you can’t know that that’s what killed him, can you?” Jerry asked -I mean, other people get skull fractures and live. I had one myself when I was a kid, bigger than this, and I’m doing just fine, thanks.“ He scratched the corner of his mouth with his pipe. ”Well, fairly well.“

Gideon smiled. “Sure, but I think we can assume that yours has healed, Jerry. This guy’s hasn’t. That means he died before it had a chance to start mending. Which means the chances are very good that it’s what killed him. Of course, it’s possible that something else might have done it, so if we want to stay within the realm of certainty, all we can say is that he received a severe head injury very shortly before his death.”

“Well, yeah, I guess I can accept that,” Jerry said, getting out his tobacco again.

TJ gave him a brisk double-tap on the shoulder. “Good of you, old chap. So, Gideon, aside from that, is there