Dead Men's Hearts

She handed him a slip of paper with the telephone number, leveled one more unappreciative glance at his work and/or his lunch, and made her exit.

Gideon had heard war stories from Phil about the misdirected calls, long waits, and generally horrible state of the Egyptian telephone system, but apparently they didn’t apply to lines that went to the police department because he had gotten through to Saleh with satisfactory speed—on the second try, in fact—and the phone had been picked up on the first ring.

But the major’s attitude proved to be less satisfactory. He began with condolences on Haddon’s death, but Gideon had barely gotten to the skeletons when Saleh interrupted with an indulgent laugh.

“Let us go back a few days and look at this from the beginning, Professor. A human skeleton is discovered at Horizon House. How sinister! To the American mind, what can it be but murder? The police are called. An investigation is launched. And the result? Not murder at all, but an innocent museum piece many thousands of years old that had strayed a few feet from its place. The police file is closed.”

It wasn’t looking good. Saleh sounded just like el-Basset: important, dismissive, preoccupied, and wholly disinclined to take him seriously.

“Major—”

“An eminent American professor appears on the scene,” Saleh continued over Gideon’s voice, “and deduces that the bones are those of an ancient scribe.” He paused to let this sink in. “That is correct, is it not?”

Yes, damn it, it was correct. How did Saleh know about it? “I made a mistake,” Gideon grumbled.

“A few days later,” Saleh went on, “another skeleton is discovered. The professor rethinks his earlier conclusions. The new skeleton is the migrating museum piece; the other one is not ancient after all, but that of a modern—”

“Major, it’s not a matter of rethinking. There’s evidence.” He explained—briefly; he could sense Saleh’s attention wandering—about the writing on the bones, about the coloring, about the smell, the taste—

“But all these things,” Saleh interrupted again, “are, forgive me, matters of opinion? With no way to prove?”

“No, that’s not so. Bones can be tested for age: fluorine level, nitrogen content, pH level—”

“And you can do these tests here?”

“Well, no.”

“Well, neither can I.”

Clunk.

Gideon tried again. “I think we have something more important here than how old the bones are, Major. I think we have a murder.”

“Murder in the reign of Userkaf or murder now?” Saleh said pleasantly.

Gideon didn’t like it, but he swallowed it. As calmly as he could, he explained, but he could hear Saleh engaged, sotto voce, in another conversation.

“Yes, well,” Saleh said, interrupting him yet again, “we will certainly look into this.”‘

Gideon was not cheered. “And there’s something else,” he said rapidly, trying to keep Saleh from hanging up. “I think Dr. Haddon’s death may not have been an accident.”

“Yes, I spoke to General el-Basset yesterday. He was quite impressed with your theories.”

Gideon gritted his teeth and plowed ahead against the odds. “Those antemortem abrasions on his face—”

“Professor Oliver? Perhaps it would be better to consider one murder at a time?”

“Look, Major,” Gideon snapped, “as far as I’m concerned, if you don’t care about letting murderers run around loose, then the hell with it, do what you want. It’s your country.”

It was hardly the way to bring Saleh around, but by now Gideon was feeling patronized and thoroughly surly. It did him good to let off some steam.

Saleh let a moment pass, then surprised him. “Would iv be possible for you to put your findings into a report?” As if Gideon hadn’t just finished jumping down his throat.

It took him a moment to shift gears. “You want me to write them up?”

“If it would cause no difficulty.”

“I’d be glad to.” Was this progress? Had he shamed Saleh into action?

“And if I sent someone to pick it up at, say, four o’clock, it might be ready?”

“It’ll be ready.”

After he hung up Gideon took a walk to get his blood going again—he’d been cooped up with the bones for three hours—but was driven back by the sun into the relative coolness of the high-ceilinged annex. From the main house buffet he brought back a glass of blessedly sugarless iced coffee to sip while he stared moodily at the bones of the unknown man who’d breathed his last in the enclosure perhaps five years ago. He wasn’t sure whether he’d gotten a brush-off from Saleh or not, but the major would get his report. And that would have to be that, however Gideon felt about it. He didn’t see any way to fight the entire Egyptian bureaucracy, and solving crimes without the police was Phil’s approach to things, not his.

The basic skeletal work had been done: sexing, aging, racing, stature estimation (that had taken a call to a Cambridge colleague for the Trotter-Gleser multiple regression formulas), and so on. And, of course, the probable cause of death. All in all, he’d pulled a fair amount of information from this chewed-up cluster of scraps, but he had yet to come up with what he wanted most: an alternative explanation for the assemblage of traits that so perfectly mimicked the pattern that went along with a life as a scribe. What had he been or done? What habitual patterns of behavior had left that distinctive and unusual record in his skeleton?