Dead Men's Hearts

“And he’s positive it came from here?”

Phil’s question received a vigorous nod and a long, excited recitation.

“He says he ran back here and looked for a long time. He had his pole ready to drag someone back in, but he couldn’t see Haddon because he was hooked on the post at the front of the platform, so he was being dragged along underneath it, where there wasn’t a chance of seeing him in the dark.

Besides, it never occurred to him that anything was caught on the ship itself. He was searching the water behind it. The poor kid’s afraid he’s going to lose his job over this.“

“No, he didn’t do anything wrong. We can speak up to the captain for him if need be.”

Mahmoud looked only marginally heartened when this was passed along in Phil’s reassuring fashion.

“When he found him this morning,” Gideon said, “how was Haddon in the water? Face up? Face down? On his side?”

“On his side,” Phil said after getting an answer, “with his back against the ship. The epaulet was caught from behind.”

“When he pulled him up onto the deck, did he possibly bump Haddon’s face against anything?”

“If he did, I assure you he’s not going to say so.”

“Probably not, but ask him anyway. Tell him he’s not going to get in any trouble.”

Mahmoud’s answer was earnest and involved, with the other crewman chiming in too. There was much ardent chest-pounding.

“They say they couldn’t have been more careful. They handled him like a baby. They swear on Allah’s name that his head was broken before they ever touched him.”

Gideon almost smiled.

“What’s up, Gideon?” Phil asked. “Why all the questions? Is there a problem?”

“I think so, Phil.”

He got back down on one knee, beside the dead man’s ashen face, to look again at two relatively inconspicuous sets of marks in the skin, one on the prominence of Haddon’s left cheek, the other on the rounded part of his forehead above the half-closed left eye. Compared to the wound at the top of his head, of course, anything would have been relatively inconspicuous, but these really were nothing very striking, nothing very serious. The ones on the cheek were a couple of straight, half-inch-long scratches or indentations, parallel to each other, an inch apart, and offset by about half an inch. The ones on the forehead were similar, but instead of being parallel, the two lines intersected to form a perfect little X. These too were superficial. There had been no bruising, and probably not much bleeding.

“These marks on his face,” Gideon said. “Do you remember seeing them yesterday?”

Phil leaned close to Haddon for a better look. As a man who had put in a lot of time in the back alleys of Cairo and Istanbul, squeamishness wasn’t one of his problems.

“No,” he said, straightening up. “They weren’t there yesterday, not at dinner.”

“So when did he get them?” Gideon asked as he got to his feet. “That’s the problem.”

“Are you serious? The man falls from the upper deck onto his face, cracks open his head, is then dragged alongside a boat for five hours, and you’re wondering why he’s scratched‘?”

“He didn’t fall onto his face, he fell onto the top of his head.

“All right, he scraped it on the way down, against the side of the ship.”

“They’re not scrapes, they’re clean, sharp impact abrasions—well, I think they are. What you get from being hit straight on.”

“Well, then, why couldn’t he have bumped his head on the railing before he toppled over? He was pretty thoroughly potted, remember.”

“He hit his head on the railing and then fell over it? That’s a little hard to imagine, no matter how potted he was.”

“All right, then, perhaps you’re wrong about his landing strictly on his head. Perhaps he fell in such a way as to strike both his face and… no?”

Gideon was shaking his head. He brought Phil over to the side to look at the small outboard platform.

Phil looked. “What am I supposed to see?”

“What did he hit his face on? What is there to make those parallel lines, that X?”

“Well…” Phil cocked his head and rubbed his hand over his short brown hair. “You know, you’re right,” he said. And where there had been a tolerant skepticism before, there was something else now: a thoughtfulness, a quickening interest.

“I see where it is you’re heading, Gideon. Let me make sure I have it straight. Are you saying that someone killed him? Someone hit him in the face with something, maybe knocked him unconscious? And then threw him overboard? Because of… what? That affair with the statue head? Is that what you’re thinking?”

Yes, it was what he was thinking, it was precisely what he was thinking. But hearing it laid out as baldly as that, he found himself backing off. This wouldn’t be the first time he’d let himself get carried away on ambiguous little forensic clues—on hunches, really. Sometimes there turned out to be something to them; more often there didn’t. “Well, I’m not ready to go as far as that, Phil.” But now he’d gotten Phil going. “Baloney, I know you, Gideon. That’s what you think, all right. And I think you’re right.”

“Not necessarily. How do we know he didn’t hurt his face after dinner last night, two or three hours before he