Dead Men's Hearts

“Now wait,” Phil said. “Even I know that el-Fuqani was a commoners’ cemetery. They wouldn’t have been mummified.”

“No, but even so they sometimes pumped a load of the stuff into the abdomen before they laid them in the ground, more or less for form’s sake. That’s why the stains are just on the pelvis and lower vertebrae.”

Phil sipped his tea. “Ah, so.”

None of these indicators, Gideon went on, were to be seen on the bones from the storage box. Hence, (a) they weren’t from Lambert’s dig, and (b) the chances were that they had never been on the inside of an ancient Egyptian at all.

“No offense, Gideon,” Phil said at length, “but why didn’t you mention any of this the other night when you looked at it?”

“I didn’t mention it because I didn’t notice it,” Gideon said ruefully, “which is what I get for trying to show off when I’m half-asleep.”

“ ‘He who plays with cats must bear the scratches,” “ said Phil. ”Another old Egyptian proverb, or maybe that one’s Persian. Tell me, what was the business about tasting them?“

“Oh, I was thinking about all the trouble Luxor has with salts in the soil. I thought I might be able to taste them, assuming the bones spent a few millennia in the ground.”

“And?”

“See for yourself,” Gideon said. “Take your pick, any bone will do.”

Phil smiled. “Why don’t you just tell me?”

“The ones from the bag taste salty,” Gideon said, “and the ones from the storage box don’t.”

“Which must mean you’re right.” Phil looked down at the bones. “The ones from the bag, the ones they just dug up, are the real McCoy. The ones they found the other night are fakes, new bones.” He glanced up with a peculiar expression. “How new, I wonder.”

“Ah, I almost forgot.” Gideon went to the sink, got out the femurs, and patted them dry with paper towels from a roll on the wall. “Let’s do some more smelling.”

“Oh, good,” Phil said.

Gideon sniffed at each of them.

“Strange,” Phil murmured. “All those cases of yours that I’ve heard you talk about—I’m not sure what I pictured you doing, but I always imagined the basic tools were calipers and suchlike. I never realized the job was fundamentally nose work.”

“More than you might think. Take another whiff yourself, will you?”

With a sigh of forbearance, Phil complied.

“Now it smells like wet old skeleton,” he said. “Which one is this?”

“The real one, the one from the bag. Now try the other one.”

Phil held it to his nose, sniffed, lifted his eyebrows, and sniffed again. “Now that’s interesting. It’s got a smell now. Like… like… what am I trying to… candles! It smells like wax.”

“Exactly,” Gideon said. “What you’re smelling is the grease in the bone, the fat. It’s what bones smell like for a few years after the flesh is gone. Sometimes, if the odor’s started to fade, putting them in water brings it out. And it means the remains are recent.”

“How recent?”

“Oh… under ten years, anyway. Two to five years would be my guess.”

Phil picked up the skull that went with the femur. “This is only about five years old?”

“Maybe a year or two more.”

Phil regarded him gravely, eyes narrowed. “So, Doctor, I take it you might be revising your earlier opinion?”

Gideon frowned. “My earlier opinion?”

Phil patted the skull. “About this gentleman having been a Fifth Dynasty scribe.”

He cackled with laughter, and after a moment Gideon burst out laughing too. “I may have to rethink that, yes.”

“Well, that’s very reassuring to us poor mortals. To know that even the great Skeleton Detective can screw up sometimes.”

“Royally,” Gideon said.

“But you know,” Phil said, “this is extremely weird. If you’re right, think about what it means. Sometime in the last ten years someone takes the real 4360 from its box and buries it in the old dump—the old old dump. Then he substitutes a new skeleton for it—and where do you get a new skeleton, by the way?—and goes to the not inconsiderable trouble of writing all the numbers in this delicate, old- fashioned script to make it look authentic. And then he goes ahead and puts that one in the storage enclosure, where it was almost equally unlikely to be found. It doesn’t—”

“Not exactly, Phil. I don’t think anyone put those bones in the enclosure. I think they were there because somebody died there and never left. And I don’t think the rest of it was done sometime in the last ten years, I think it was done sometime in the last ten days.”

The candle wax odor had seeped into the air from the damp bone now, faint but sickly. The students in the other room had gone. The musty building with its bits and pieces of five thousand years was silent and spooky.