Dead Men's Hearts

“What’s sinister is what happened later. If it was just an innocent fall, why did someone go to the rather extreme trouble—and extreme risk—of writing phony numbers on his bones to cover it up? Why did someone take the other skeleton out of the box and bury it?”

Phil nodded slowly. “Yes, I see what you mean.” A flicker of excitement lit up his face. “You know, I could do some asking around about missing people at the city offices; a little bakshish goes a long way. If we could establish a connection between this character and—”

“If the police could establish a connection,” Gideon said, heading him off before he got up a full head of steam. A moment later, a little doubtfully, he said: “Phil, when I tell the police about this they will have to act, won’t they? It’s got to be related to what happened to Haddon. They couldn’t just ignore this thing too.”

“Gideon, I’m sorry to be the one to keep telling you this, but they can do whatever they damn well please.”

“But that’s—”

“On the other hand,” he admitted, “the Luxor police aren’t the river and tourist police. These people are serious cops, more independent, so you might have better luck. Go ahead, give them a call; it can’t hurt. Would you like me to do it for you?”

“Would you? Just ask them to send somebody over so I can show them. I’ll be here for a while yet.”

Phil nodded. He got up and took a last look at the bone-laden table.

“Well, what was he, then? If not a scribe.”

Another good question, one that Gideon himself hadn’t gotten around to thinking about yet. The first time he’d seen the remains he’d been misled because he had started with preconceptions about them. That was a lesson that never seemed to take no matter how many times he learned it, but the markers that had led him astray—that had let him lead himself astray—were real enough: the roughened ischial tuberosities of the pelvis, the pronounced ligament-attachment area on the finger bone, the bowed fibula.

In Fifth Dynasty Thebes they added up to scribe. But Thebes was long gone, and so the question was: what did they add up to in twentieth-century Luxor? What habitual, modern modes of behavior could mold the bone in these particular ways? And what other signs were there in the bumps and ridges and hollows of the bones that might provide clues as to how this mysterious man, so bizarrely misidentified in death, had lived his life? He didn’t doubt that he had missed some during his brief, groggy examination the other night.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Are you going to be able to tell?”

He shrugged. “Could be.”

It was the kind of problem he loved, the essential question that was at the heart of every analysis of every paper sack or cardboard box or body bag of bones that had been made by every physical anthropologist since the field had begun: who and what was this person?

He had been getting a little tired, but now he could feel the energy begin to flow again. He was ready for another hour or two with the bones, but on his own. He needed to go at things at his own pace and in his own uneven, doubling-back way, without having to explain every step and every partial conclusion. He wanted time, solitary and leisurely…

Phil was still standing at the table, showing no signs of leaving.

“Phil…”

“I know, I know. I’m going. I’ve seen that look before.” He headed for the door. “If you don’t show up at lunch I’ll bring over a sandwich.”

Gideon was already bent over the bones, fingering, hefting, comparing. “Hm?”

“Bye,” said Phil.

Chapter Sixteen

He had no formulas or tables to work from, but he did find a pair of spreading calipers and a steel tape measure in the other workroom, and those would get him by. For an hour he made steady progress, interrupted only by the return of Phil at noon with two chicken-salad sandwiches and a bottle of Thumbs-Up Cola. The Luxor police had been contacted and had promised to respond with dispatch, he said. They had even sounded as if they meant it.

At 1:30, still hunched over the worktable, he had just gotten to the sandwiches when Mrs. Ebeid, Horizon House’s administrative assistant, appeared. A meticulous woman of earnest propriety, she had commandeered Gideon and Julie for half an hour almost the moment they’d arrived to impress on them the sacrosanct and inviolable rules of Horizon House residence: towel allotments, linens, eating times, no food in the rooms, make your own bed, no air conditioner unless the temperature reached a hundred degrees.

“You didn’t hear the telephone ring?”

Gideon, caught in mid-thought and mid-bite, looked up. “What?”

She eyed him. “You didn’t hear the telephone ring?”

“No. Yes, maybe. It was in another room. I didn’t think it was for me.”

Mrs. Ebeid’s nose quivered. She had picked up the smell of the still-moist femur. She looked down at what he was doing and took a step backward, apparently unused to seeing someone with a human fibula in one hand and a chicken-salad sandwich in the other.

Possibly it was against the Horizon House rules. “Was it for me?” he asked. Delicately, he placed the fibula on the table.

Mrs. Ebeid remained at her new distance, which made him twist to look at her. “It was. Major Saleh of the police. He is most anxious to speak with you.”

“Well, I’m anxious to speak with him. How do I get hold of him?”