Dead Men's Hearts

“True, but Egyptian mummies were prepared and embalmed so that they’d last forever, and then put in six or seven layers of cloth and wood and stone, and hidden away so no human eyes would ever see them again. And now, there they are, these august dignitaries, moldering away in the open with their noses falling off, and anybody who wants to can walk in and gawk at them for as long as they want. It’s not quite—well, decent.”

Julie tilted her head to study him. “I’ve finally figured out what your problem is. In life, I mean.”

Gideon laughed. “What’s my problem?”

“You’re too squeamish to be a forensic anthropologist.”

He grinned. “Tell me about it.”

When a subdued Phil came back from the hospital and joined them on the deck he was unsurprised by Gideon’s recounting of el-Basset’s refusal to look the facts in the eye.

The Egyptian police, he explained, were in a difficult position at the moment. The tourist trade that was so vital to the economy had fallen off since the fundamentalist unrest and especially the attacks on foreigners had begun. As a result, a worried government was putting a lot of pressure on the police to stay on good terms with foreign countries, particularly countries with thousands of tourists who might visit Egypt. Particularly, in other words, the United States.

“I don’t get it,” Gideon said. “They certainly weren’t trying to stay on particularly good terms with me.”

That wasn’t the point, Phil said. From their point of view, it was bad enough to have a prominent American like Clifford Haddon die in an accident on a Nile steamer, but to turn it into a murder investigation was the last thing in the world they wanted.

“And on top of that to find themselves putting some other American on trial?” Phil shook his head while he sucked down iced tea. “To end up having to execute him, perhaps? You can forget that.”

“So what are we supposed to do?” Gideon asked grouchily. “Go with the flow?”

Phil’s thin shoulders lifted in a weary shrug. “I suppose so.”

Phil had had a tough morning too. Unshaven and red-eyed, he looked so thoroughly wilted that Gideon didn’t have the heart to pursue it. Besides, he didn’t have any ideas either.

For the rest of the day an edgy, unsettled moodiness prevailed. The Menshiya left at 11:30 and made its slow way to Abydos, where there was an afternoon’s taping among the dim, appropriately funereal sanctuaries of the Temple of Seti I. Gideon, backed by the splendid, brooding stone pillars of the Inner Hypostyle Hall, talked about the place of the afterlife in the daily lives of the ancient Egyptians, but his mind wasn’t on it and it went poorly. So did the rest of the shooting, despite Forrest’s desperate efforts to pump some energy into it.

Matters weren’t helped by the arrival of a huge bilingual tourist group whose two guides nattered on unrelentingly in English and French and spurred their grumbling charges from one echoing sanctuary to another with the imperious tlik-tlak of hand-clickers. When Forrest finally lost what little patience he had left and screamed at them to be quiet, the frazzled guides screamed back, clicking their clickers in his face. It took two elderly tourist policemen half an hour to settle things down enough for the taping to proceed.

At one point, when Gideon went out into the forecourt to get some fresh air and natural light—and a little quiet—TJ trudged up to him.

“I don’t suppose you’ve seen those stupid ornaments, have you?”

“Huh? What ornaments?”

He had been leaning against the building’s wall, absorbed in looking out at the ramshackle village that sprawled around the temple site. Except for the thatch-roofed tourist compound directly across the dusty street—“Cafeteria Camp. Sandwich hot and cold drink. We sale perfums.”—it looked as if it had been there for millennia, as long as Abydos itself. But it had achieved its remarkably tired and dilapidated look all in this century. He knew because the early photos of Abydos showed the temples sitting all alone in the desert, half-buried in miles of drifting sand. Things aged quickly here.

“Those things Dr. Afifi got out for Arlo. You’re the only one I haven’t asked.”

“No, I haven’t seen them. Why, are they missing?”

“Misplaced, more likely. I called Horizon House from Sohag to check in with Mrs. Ebeid and she told me he called to ask if we happened to take one of the boxes with us. I didn’t even know what she was talking about. Arlo says they never left the room they were laid out in, as far as he knows. He also says they were junk.”

“That’s what I’d say too. You know, a busload of school kids showed up about the time we were leaving. If the boxes were still right there on that table, it could be that one of them walked off with it.”

“Maybe. What would a kid want with stuff like that?”

Gideon shook his head. “What would anybody want with it?”

TJ sighed. “Well, thanks anyway. Hell, if this is the kind of thing the director spends her time on, I’m not so sure I want the damn job.”

They were silent for a few minutes, enjoying the shade of the thick, ancient wall at their back and watching the tour group get herded unwillingly into the Cafeteria Camp across the street.

“Can I say something?” TJ said suddenly. “Forget trying to figure out which one of us killed Haddon.”

Now where had that come from? He’d said nothing to anyone else aboard the ship about those marks, and he was positive that Julie and Phil hadn’t either.

“When did I ever say—”

“It’s all over your face. You’ve been beady-eyeing everybody all day, thinking suspicious thoughts.”