Dead Men's Hearts

“Not just something,” Phil said, getting most of it down. “I found what we’re looking for.”

Abruptly, he was out of his chair. “Come along, Skeleton Detective, I’ll explain the whole thing to you.” He led them rapidly around the swimming pool to the port railing.

“There you are,” he said, pointing straight down, toward their feet.

They were standing near the center of the ship at a gate in the railing that was now closed and locked, but was used for boarding from the port side. At those times the gangplank was hooked to a grating in the deck, a two-by- three-foot rectangle fitted into a space that had been cut in the flooring for it, and on which they were now standing. There was an identical arrangement on the starboard side, to which the gangplank was now attached.

Looking through the open grillwork of the grate, Gideon could see a section of the lower deck twenty feet below them.

“What do you think?” Phil asked. “Is that what did it or not?”

He was pointing at something below, but Gideon couldn’t make out what. The life-ring holder? The bench alongside the crew’s cabin? “Is what what did it, damn it?”

“No, not down there, here.” He tapped his foot. “This, you dummy. The grating.”

“The grating?” Gideon echoed, and then he understood. “The grating!”

He dropped to one knee beside it. It was a latticework of sturdy, edge-up metal strips that crossed each other to form diamond-shaped spaces. The sides of the diamonds were about an inch apart, and because a diamond was a rhombus the parallel lines were slightly offset, precisely like the parallel marks on Haddon’s cheeks.

And each intersection was, of course, a perfect little X.

“Well?” Phil demanded.

Gideon got to his feet. “You’re right,” he said softly. “He fell. Here, on his face.”

Julie let out a sigh. “What a relief. That is,” she said quickly, “it’s a relief to know nobody hit him in the face, nobody threw him overboard. There’s no murderer in our midst. An innocent slip by a tipsy man on a dark night, that’s all.”

Phil scratched his cheek. “Too bad, in a way. I mean to say, as long as he’s dead in any case, a murder would have made it more interesting, if you know what I mean.” He frowned. “I didn’t put that very well, but it was exciting while it lasted, wasn’t it?”

Gideon was looking down at the grating, his arms folded. “Don’t write it off too soon.”

“Uh-oh,” Julie murmured, “here comes a new theory. Pardon, hypothesis.”

“Whenever you find facial impact abrasions from a fall,” Gideon said, almost to himself, “it’s almost certainly a sign that the person wasn’t conscious at the time that he went down. Nobody, tipsy or not, lands flat on his face like that. You turn your head, you throw up your hand to break the fall. It’s instinctive.”

Julie frowned at him. “All right, so he lost consciousness and fell. Maybe he had more to drink in his room. What’s so suspicious about it?”

“It’s not suspicious that he fell, it’s suspicious that he got up again.”

“I don’t understand,” Julie said.

“I don’t understand either,” Phil said.

“How did he get over the side?” Gideon asked them.

“How?” Julie said. “He got to his feet, he staggered to the railing, he lost his balance again—”

Gideon shook his head. “When you pass out from drinking it’s because your central nervous system has essentially collapsed on you. And your blood alcohol level doesn’t started going down just because you’ve stopped drinking, it keeps on rising because the alcohol is still being absorbed. An hour into unconsciousness you’re drunker than you were when you passed out; a lot of times that’s when people die. Believe me, nobody who passes out drunk is going to be getting up on his own steam anytime soon.”

Phil leaned his arms on the railing, gazing across the river. “So you’re implying…”

“I’m implying Haddon was unconscious—maybe dead— when he fell here on the deck. I’m saying it took somebody else to get him over the side.”

“We’re back to murder?” Julie said. “Oh gosh, what now?”

“Now,” Gideon said, “I think I better go take on the Commanding General of River and Tourist Police, Governate of Sohag.” He pushed himself away from the railing. “Not that I’m looking forward to it.”

“Try not to make him mad,” was Phil’s helpful counsel.

General el-Basset was not to be found on the stern deck when Gideon got there a minute later. Neither was Dr. Dowidar or either of the sailors. And neither was Haddon. The decking where he’d lain had already been swabbed. Gideon was astonished. He’d been gone only an hour.

At the guest services desk upstairs Mr. Wahab told him that the general was in the guest library next to the dining room. He also informed him, with equal parts outraged dignity and nervous distress, that nothing such as this had ever happened before in the history of the Happy Nomad Navigation Company.

Gideon offered his apologies, which seemed to make him feel a little better.

He found el-Basset at the single table that almost filled the little room, a row of outdated Country Life on the magazine rack behind him and an emptied Turkish coffee cup at his elbow. He was smoking a cigarette and making notes in Arabic in a pad, but looked up when he saw Gideon approaching, screwed the top on his fountain pen, and motioned him into a chair across from him. He appeared at peace with himself; relaxed and above it all.