He separated the offending bones and laid them out in front of him: the innominates with their roughened ischial tuberosities; the bowed fibula; the finger bone with its marked ligament-attachment lines. To them he added a metacarpal that also had some unusually prominent areas of ligament attachment, and one other oddity that had puzzled him from the beginning: the skull with its unusual tooth wear pattern: incisors worn down almost to nubs, while the molars showed only moderate wear. Humans did their chewing with their back teeth; if you were going to get extensive attrition anywhere, it ought to be on the molars.
It was the second time he had looked at them all in a row like this, and once again he had the feeling that the answer was there, right in front of him, just out of reach. In finger-snapping distance, so to speak.
It was possible, of course, that there was no single explanation, that each trait had a separate, unrelated cause, but he couldn’t make himself quite believe that. There was a configuration here, a constellation that taken as a whole made sense if he could only comprehend it. For the dozenth time he picked up the fibula, the phalanx, the inominate. He fingered them, turned them over, put them down. He sat on a high stool, his heels hooked over the rungs, and chewed ice from the coffee. He picked them up again.
Five minutes later he snapped his fingers.
At 4:10, a police constable with smudged glasses and only a few words of English came to get the report, which Gideon had typed on a forty-year-old Remington he’d found in a dusty office. After considerable protest and two calls to police headquarters the constable reluctantly agreed to take away the skeletal material, which Gideon felt would be better off in the police vault than lying around Horizon House, prey to who knows what new drollery.
Once the constable had left with his unwelcome burden, Gideon washed up and went to the other workroom, where some of the students had regathered to number pottery and gossip some more about Haddon’s death.
“Excuse me, is one of you Stacey?”
A young black woman with a scarf around her head looked up from the row of potsherds on the table in front of her. 1 am.
“Stacey,” Gideon said, “do you suppose I could have a few minutes of your time?”
Chapter Seventeen
“Welcome in Egypt! Where you want to go?”
As soon as they’d stepped through the Horizon House gate they had flagged down (or rather been flagged down by) one of the string of caleche drivers who lounged along the curb, polishing the tin decorations on their carriages, chatting with each other, and smoking cigarettes.
“Shari Tahrir,” Phil told him, heaving himself up to ride shotgun beside the driver while Julie and Gideon climbed into the hansom’s regal passenger seats.
They had had predinner gin-and-tonics in Phil’s room, where the window fan was marginally better (if noisier) than their own, and infinitely superior to the gurgling, rattling, next-to-useless air-conditioning that had been turned on in the main house the instant the temperature had hit a hundred degrees.
Julie, who had spent the day putting in volunteer labor at WV-29, TJ’s dig across the river, had needed to be filled in on things, and an hour’s discussion of Horizon House foul play, past and present, had left all three without much inclination to have dinner with the others in the dining room. (Please pass the salt.
That being the case, Phil suggested that they go “grazing” at some of his new
“But no lamb’s eyeballs, agreed?” Gideon said now, as the driver set the well-decorated but swaybacked horse more or less in motion. “No fatted sheep’s tails.”
Phil turned in his seat to gaze pityingly down on him. “Julie, when did this man get to be such a wimp?”
“I can tell you exactly when,” Gideon said. “Two years ago, in Madrid, when you took me to the tapas bars where the ‘real’ people went. A distinguishing characteristic of real people,” he said to Julie, “seems to be a proclivity to be a little careless about waste disposal. We were up to our knees in shrimp crania, fish bones, and spit all night long.”
Julie laughed. “Do shrimp have crania?”
“Sure they have crania. And they crackle when you step on them.”
“But what about the tapas?” Phil asked. “Good or not good?”
“Not bad,” admitted Gideon.
“Well, I suppose that was a fairly rough crowd,” Phil admitted in his turn, “but nothing like that tonight. You may put your faith in me. We won’t go anywhere that I wouldn’t recommend to my readers.”
“That’s what worries me,” Gideon said.
The driver, who had been waiting for a pause in the conversation, joined in with a dazzling smile. “I, Gamal. Horse, Napoleon. You go
Phil murmured a few fluid sentences in Arabic. Gamal, after registering his amazement, haughtily ignored them and gave his attention to nudging Napoleon along at a dignified pace befitting both its name and the weather. At a little after 6 p.m. the sun’s rays were no longer searing anything they hit, but the evening breeze off the Nile had yet to spring up and the temperature was still an unseasonably warm hundreddegrees. The feeble stir of air created by Napoleon’s ambling along was welcome.
They drove into central Luxor on the jammed Corniche and were soon towered over by smog-belching trucks and sleek tourist buses with sinister black windows. Bicyclists darted death-defyingly around and between motor vehicles. Automobile-tired carts of vegetables dragged by slow, weary donkeys set off long fits of hysterical horn- blowing in their wakes, to which their nodding drivers, probably dreaming of the dinners awaiting them in their villages, seemed totally oblivious.
Gamal did what he could to add to the bedlam, frequently standing up to brandish his whip and berate truck
