“You’d sure think so.”
“I’m really not very good at this sort of thing,” Arlo said.
“Okay,” Forrest said, “anybody who’s not involved in the shooting, you’re free to spend the morning wherever you want. But remember, the boat has to leave at one o’clock sharp, so
And miss even a single, splendid day of Anatolian boar-hunting, Gideon thought.
Chapter Ten
The Tel el-Amarna Museum stood at the desert’s edge a few hundred yards from the river, a little more than a mile south of the huddled brown village of el-Till and hard against the scant remains of what had once been the King’s Street in the great city of Akhetaten. No more than a utilitarian structure when constructed in 1913 as headquarters for Lambert’s first excavation, the plain, one-story stucco building had been going downhill ever since. For twenty years after 1913 it had gone unused. In the 1930s, the University of Bern had taken it over for two decades. Then, in the 1950s, it had been turned over to the Egyptian government for use as a museum, but the money had never come through to properly maintain or staff it, and its finer pieces had gone one by one to more prestigious institutions. Now its undistinguished and slowly deteriorating collection was open to the public only a few afternoons a week, and irregularly at that.
It was nobody’s fault, Gideon knew. Egypt, possessor of the greatest accumulation of archaeological material in the world, also happened to be one of its poorest countries. If there wasn’t enough money to shore up the Great Sphinx against the groundwater that was eating it away, or to safeguard Luxor Temple against the corrosive salts in its soil, what chance was there to turn the dowdy Tel el-Amarna Museum into anything special? And if they did, how many people would come to visit it? Why would anyone, given the mind-numbing wealth available in the rest of the country?
Those members of the Horizon expedition who had the choice went elsewhere this morning. TJ took Julie on a tour of the ruined estates and houses that had made up the northern “suburbs” of Akhetaten, Bruno and Jerry trudged up the long incline to the famous painted cliff tombs on the ridge behind the city, Phil wandered around the village of el-Till making new friends, and Bea got a book and a pitcher of tea and went up to the
Gideon, Arlo, Haddon, and the film crew had the museum to themselves except for Dr. Afifi, the cadaverous, understandably hangdog museum director, who hovered, apologetic and solicitous, in the background.
Shooting began in the workroom, formerly a classroom in which a bright and single-minded twenty-year-old named Clifford Henry Haddon had been among those who had succeeded in penetrating the mysteries of hieroglyphic symbols at the feet of the celebrated Professor Heinrich Wiedermeister of the University of Bern.
But this morning’s interview, with Gideon watching from the back of the room, got off to a poor start. Haddon, standing in front of some racks of inscribed stone fragments and looking slightly ridiculous in an oversized bush jacket with enough shotgun-cartridge loops to satisfy the most bloodthirsty White Hunter, was stiff and fussy, squinting under the hot pole-lights. Patsy, cigarillo dangling from the corner of her mouth, was sweating grouchily over a tangle of wires while Cy, looking as if he might topple over asleep at any second, manned a videocamera set up on a tripod. Forrest, who had the ability to look bored and desperate at the same time, was alongside the camera, keeping his eyes mostly on a monitor a few feet away and prompting Haddon with edgy questions.
“And so after you got your master’s degree at Yale, you came directly here to work on the dig and study with Wiedermeister, is that right?” He was maintaining the singsong, doggedly cheerful tone employed by the edgy young when dealing with the recalcitrant elderly.
“Well—”
“Cut,” Forrest said. “Please, Dr. Haddon, look, I don’t mean to keep interrupting, but would you try not to start every sentence with ‘well’?” It was only 8:10 in the morning and already his smile was tight and glassy. “Okay? All right?”
Haddon compressed his lips and nodded. His beard stuck out straighter.
“All right, do you want to start again? Try to make it sound interesting now.”
“I will try,” Haddon said, “difficult as it may prove.”
Things, Gideon thought, were not improving.
Haddon waited for the signal to begin again, and peered frankly into the lens. “In the fall of 1944, with my master’s degree in hand, I leaped at the chance to come—”
“Cut,” Forrest said. He smiled harder. “This is just great, really great, but it would be even better if you didn’t look into the camera. It makes it a little severe. You know, like Uncle Sam saying ‘I want you’? We can’t have that, can we?”
He laughed. Haddon glowered.
Forrest’s massive face arranged itself into a merry smile. “So. Just speak right to me, not to the camera. ”Okay? All right?“
Haddon gritted his teeth, nodded, and started when Forrest dropped his chin. “Well—”
“Young man, I will make a bargain with you,” Haddon said. “If you stop saying ‘Okay? All right?”, I’ll stop saying ’well.“ How does that suit you?”
Gideon winced. Tempers were already simmering, and it was just the first hour of the first morning of taping. Making a movie, a retired Port Angeles neighbor who had worked in Hollywood had once told him, was like making sausage. The finished product might be terrific, but you didn’t necessarily want to watch the process.
He made an unobtrusive exit and wandered for twenty minutes or so through the ill-lit, poorly labeled museum, but there wasn’t much to hold his attention: broken stelae, fragmentary statues, a few shabby, anonymous mummies and mummy cases. All in all, watching the rest of Haddon’s interview promised to be more uplifting.
On the way back he passed a small library in which Arlo and Dr. Afifi stood at a table, arranging five or six shoebox-sized containers. When Gideon entered, Dr. Afifi excused himself and humbly backed out, leaving the room to the two Americans as if he had been the intruder.
