“Really?” Phil said, ratcheting the English drawl up a notch. “How informative.”
“Don’t be impertinent,” Gideon said. “Watch and learn.” He touched both of the bones in turn to his tongue and considered.
Phil grimaced. “My God, what next? I shudder to think. Does Julie know that the man she kisses goes around doing that?”
Gideon held out the one from the bag. “Here, you try it.”
Phil reared back. “You’re out of your mind.”
Gideon looked at him. “This from the man who never turns down a new experience? What would your readers think?”
Phil held up his hands. “You have to draw the line somewhere.”
“All right, just smell it.” Gideon extended the bone again.
Phil stood up, put down his tea, and sniffed, gingerly but gamely. He shook his head. “So?”
“What’s it smell like?”
Phil was clearly at a loss. “Like a skeleton?”
“Like an
Phil laughed. “Gideon, the only skeletons I’ve ever smelled have been old skeletons, and as I recall, this is what they smelled like. How would I know what a new skeleton smells like?”
“All right, what about this one?” Gideon held out the other femur. “This one’s from the 4360 box. The first one was from the bag that just got turned up.”
Phil took it from him doubtfully. “I hope I’m not being too inquisitive, but why are we standing here smelling bones, exactly?”
“Humor me.”
Phil took another cautious sniff and shook his head again.
“Well?” Gideon said. “What’s it smell like?”
“Like—I don’t know. It doesn’t have a smell.”
“Not like a bone from a dig?”
“Well… I guess not. It doesn’t smell like anything at all. Does that mean something?”
“I’d say it means it’s a fake.”
“A fake?” Phil laughed uncertainly. “A fake what?”
“A fake 4360.”
He thought this over for a moment. “You mean an accidental duplication of identification numbers, an error in —”
Gideon shook his head. “I don’t think so. Let’s try something.” He went to a steel sink along the wall, laid the femurs in it side by side, and set the rubber stopper in the drain. Then he ran a few inches of water into the tub, covering the two bones. “We’ll let them sit for a minute.”
He came back to the table with a magnifying glass from the shelf over the sink.
“A fake 4360,” Phil was muttering, his skinny arms wrapped around himself. “Then this other set, the buried one, is the real one?”
“Seems that way.” Gideon began using the magnifying glass to examine the numbers on the bones that had turned up that morning.
“And you know these mysterious and enigmatic things because the bones don’t smell?”
Gideon laughed. “That and a few other things.” He gave Phil the lens. “Compare the numbers on the two sets. Try the crania.”
It took him only a few seconds. “The ones on this one—” He was holding the skull from the storage box. “—are fuzzier. These others—” He patted the skull unearthed by the backhoe. “—are crisper.”
Gideon nodded. They were crisper, he suggested, because they’d been applied in the genuine 1920s manner: first, a patch of sealant (clear nail polish was as likely as anything else) would have been painted on the bone. Then the numbers would have gone onto this foundation in India ink, and then another layer of sealant would have been applied over them. The result was that the numbers were as clear seventy years later as they’d been the day they were put on.
But the numbers on the bones in the box had not been so painstakingly prepared. They had been written directly on the bone, and the ink had bled a little into the porous surface; not enough to notice if you weren’t looking for it, but amply clear under the magnifying glass.
“Yes, I see,” said Phil pensively.
“There’s more,” Gideon said.
The differences in color for example. Both sets of remains varied from individual bone to bone, as bones often did. But the ones from the bag—and not the ones from the box—had an amber, yellowish cast overall, and the pelvis and the two lumbar vertebrae were splotched with what looked like black lichen. The cloudy yellow sheen was the result of a gluey coat of shellac that had routinely been applied to skeletal material in the 1920s because it was thought to be the best way to preserve it. The black, lichenlike stains, on the other hand, went back quite a bit further. They were the residue of the asphaltlike substance that had been so copiously (and frustratingly, from the point of view of Egyptologists) smeared onto and inside mummies in ancient times.
