“Not only that, but after it was retrieved it disappeared again, and so have some of the other fragments. And where do you think Einstein’s brain is?”
She began to shake her head again, then grimaced and burst out laughing at the same time.
He looked at her curiously.
“I was only thinking,” she said, “how dull my breakfast conversations would be if I’d married that electrical engineer from Des Moines.” She shook her head wonderingly. “My God, what a question. Anyway, the answer is that I have no idea where Einstein’s brain is.”
“Neither does anybody else, because, you see, somebody walked off with it, also apparently for a souvenir. And that’s just for starters. There’s Emanuel Swedenborg’s skull, Josef Haydn’s—”
She held up her hand. “Thank, you, starters will be sufficient. Tell me, how does the disappearing head that Haddon saw—”
“—or says he saw.”
“—fit into this? Or don’t you have a conjecture?”
“On that,” said Gideon, “I don’t even have a surmise. My guess—”
“Is that above or below a surmise?”
“Below. My guess is he imagined it. Nobody else saw it.” He glanced at his watch. “Maybe we ought to be getting back. We’re flying to el-Amarna in a few hours.”
“We have time to finish our tea. Let’s relax for a few more minutes. It’s lovely here.”
“It is that.”
“Come to think of it,” Julie said, “why are we going to el-Amarna anyway? What’s at el-Amarna?”
“El-Amarna, or rather Tel el-Amarna, is the modern name for Akhetaten, the city built by Akhenaten as his new capital when he decided to move the court out of Thebes—”
“Yes, I know all that. A new center of worship to his beloved god Aten, rather than Amon.”
“That’s right.”
“Well, you don’t have to sound so amazed. I do have an education, you know. But my question is: why are they filming there? What does Amarna have to do with Horizon House?”
“Not a lot, really, but Cordell Lambert’s old Institute of Egyptian Studies apparently started out up there. They did a season’s digging before moving to Luxor, so in a sense that’s where Horizon House began. The other thing is that later on, in the 1930s and 1940s, the University of Bern was one of the outfits that ran excavations there, and one of the graduate students who worked on them and took graduate classes on the side was the young Clifford Haddon. He learned his hieroglyphs in the expedition headquarters building—which is now the Amarna Museum.”
“Ah,” Julie said, nodding. “Human interest.”
They sat in companionable silence, sipping the cooling tea, digesting their breakfasts, and soaking up atmosphere. The Savoy’s cafe was about as international as a restaurant could be. At the tables around them were Arabs, black Africans, Europeans, Americans, and Asians laughing and chattering away in a happy babble of languages. At their feet a slate-gray cat worked the crowd, moving from table to table, eyeing the clients, and then, depending on its appraisal, either waiting for a handout or moving contemptuously on. From Julie and Gideon it got offers of the baconlike mystery meat (reservedly accepted) and marmaladed toast (scornfully declined).
“We’d better go,” Gideon said after a while. “They’ll start thinking we’ve gone over the hill altogether.”
Leaving the cafe they passed close by the table of two thin, elderly Englishmen who looked like brothers, sharing a pot of tea and a basket of pastries.
“Smog in Luxor,” said one of them, sighing deeply. “Who would have thought?”
The other shook his head. “There wasn’t any in ‘49, I can tell you that. Think what it’s doing to the monuments.”
“Think,” said the first, “what it’s doing to the people.”
The other tore a piece of baklava in two and licked his slender fingers. “That too,” he agreed languidly.
Two hours later, in the heat of the afternoon, both of the Horizon House vans drove up the Shari el-Matar to the small airport outside Luxor, arriving with twenty minutes to spare before the chartered ZAS flight to el-Minya at 2:00. In the vehicles were the participants, direct and indirect, in the making of
Besides Julie and Gideon, there were Bea and Bruno Gustafson, representing the Horizon Foundation, and Haddon, Arlo, TJ, and Jerry from Horizon House. The ninth, tenth, and eleventh members of the group were Forrest Freeman, who was directing the documentary, and his bare-bones staff: Cy, an aging, placid, child of the sixties who wore his much-thinned hair in a graying ponytail; and Patsy, a rail-thin, sinewy woman of forty-five who smoked little black cigars and might have been mute for all she said. Cy was the cameraman. Patsy seemed to do everything else, a combination soundperson, gaffer, grip, and gofer. The third member of the crew—Kermit Feiffer, the assistant director—was being left behind in Luxor to make copies of the tapes that had already been made and do arcane things with them at the local MisrFilm studio.
Their leader, Forrest Freeman, was a burly man of forty with the body of a wrestler and the soul of a worry wart. Forrest was a fretter, a man who expected the worst and expected it to be worse than he expected. Gideon had spoken with him for no more than five minutes at dinner the evening before, and another five in the van, but he had already heard about problems with the shooting schedule, with lighting, with transportation, with weather, and with the equipment. Actually, none of these had yet come to pass, but from Forrest’s point of view, it was only a matter of time. The Fates, he seemed convinced, had it in for him personally.
To be fair, he’d already had his share of woe. One of his crew, he told Gideon, had been arrested at the Cairo airport for bringing in half a kilo of hashish inside a camera. (“Can you believe it? Smuggling hash
