Dead Men's Hearts

Gideon smiled. That made twice in the last twenty-four hours that he’d been told his face was an open book. He was starting to think there might be something to it.

“It’s not just you,” TJ said as they began to walk along the temple wall. “Hell, it’s only natural. Even I thought about it for a while there. I mean, it was just too weird. He makes all these bizarre statements about that dumb head and his theories and everything, and the next thing you know they find him with his brains bashed out. It’s pretty suspicious. But there’s nothing to it, Gideon.”

“Why isn’t there anything to it?”

“Because,” she said firmly, “there is no head. There never was. He imagined it, that’s all. The story about finding it in the collection later was just his way of saving face; classic Clifford Haddon.”

“Maybe so,” Gideon said.

“Definitely so.” She stopped walking. “Look, the main reason I called Horizon House this morning was to have one of our best grad students go over to the annex and check out the Lambert collection.”

Above them, in the chinks and crevices of a frieze that still had remnants of three-thousand-year-old red and green paint on it, agitated sparrows had begun to dart about and chatter at them. They moved on.

“And there was no yellow jasper head from 1924,” TJ went on. “There were quartzite ones from 1919 and 1920, and some fragments, including yellow jasper ones, from a few different seasons, and most of a limestone head from 1925, I think. Three pretty much complete heads altogether, but none of them from 1924, and none of them yellow jasper. Stacey’s positive.”

“TJ, why would Haddon offer to show us a nonexistent head when we got back? Wouldn’t that make him look like even more of a fool? If he was making it up last night, surely he’d have said it was one of the heads that was there.”

TJ’s smile was almost fond. “Trying to outfigure Clifford Haddon is the world’s quickest way to go bananas. Trust me, I’m speaking from experience.”

“I don’t doubt it, TJ, but the fact that it isn’t there now doesn’t prove it wasn’t there two days ago when he said he saw it.”

“No way, Gideon.” They stood at the head of the long, wide stone steps leading up to the temple mound for a moment, watching the two Arab men who swept it endlessly with endless patience.

“There’s no yellow jasper head in the collection now,” TJ said unequivocally, “and there never was. Stacey checked the records. Lambert was a lousy archaeologist, but he was a careful collector. Every artifact in that collection, every potsherd, got its own number and its own object card with all the pertinent information on it. And there is no record of a yellow jasper Amarna head. In 1924 or any other year. Stacey checked every card in the file, and if she says it isn’t there, it isn’t there. Talk to her yourself when we get back.”

“I believe you,” Gideon said truthfully.

“So there was no reason for anybody to kill him.” She shrugged. “It was an accident, Gideon.”

Strange. El-Basset said there wasn’t any reason to murder Haddon over the head because it was in the collection. TJ said there wasn’t any reason because it wasn’t in the collection. The odd thing was, both of them made sense. Either way, there wasn’t any reason for anyone to kill Haddon.

But somebody had. If not over the head, then over something else.

On the ship that evening dinner was a muted affair. Afterward, as previously arranged, Mr. Wahab showed Death on the Nile in the Isis Lounge, while they continued to sail upriver. It was not quite the hit it might have been twenty-four hours earlier.

On Friday, the long cruise to Dendera for a few more hours’ shooting, with nothing to do but sit on the deck and watch the scenery slip by, began to have its effect. They fell into the rhythm of the Nile, the rhythm of Egypt, where man-made time partitions—this is play time, this is work time, this is rest time—fell away. For the Americans, the only things that shaped their day came from outside themselves, beyond their control: breakfast, teatime, lunch, teatime, cocktails, dinner. Brows cleared. Laughter and casual conversation came more easily. If anybody besides Phil, Julie, and Gideon was troubled by the circumstances of Haddon’s death, it wasn’t evident.

In the late afternoon, with the ship moored near Dendera, people sat on the upper deck over their tea or coffee and watched half a dozen men fishing from brightly painted row-boats near the far shore. They worked two to a boat, with one man lustily beating the water with an oar and the other manipulating a long, narrow net that trailed behind.

“I’ve seen that before,” Forrest said. “What’s the point of all that splashing?”

“It’s supposed to scare the fish into the net,” Phil explained.

“They’ve been fishing like that for thousands of years,” put in Arlo. “I’ve seen pictures from the Twelfth Dynasty of them doing it just that way.”

“Well,” said Bruno, “that proves something I’ve always said about fish.”

Bea looked at him. “Which is?”

“Darned slow learners.”

Late Saturday morning they finished shooting at Dendera, then continued upriver, reaching Luxor at 5:00. Mrs. Ebeid had the vans waiting for them, and they were back at Horizon House in time for dinner.

It was the first time in years that Clifford Haddon hadn’t presided at the long table. His chair was left empty.

At 9:20 the next morning Gideon was back on camera and not enjoying himself at all. He was seated comfortably enough, in one of the old-fashioned wicker patio chairs, shaded by a backdrop of trellised oleander, but he didn’t like the subject they had gotten him onto. It had begun, as scheduled, as a discussion of some of the recently developed ways of studying mummies without unwrapping them, such as CAT-scanning and various new image-processing techniques. But somewhere along the way, the topic had been diverted to the racial makeup of the ancient Egyptians.

“The best way to describe the people of dynastic Egypt,” he said, making a third try at it, “is simply as