Dead Men's Hearts

“This is getting pretty deep,” Phil said.

No, it was ridiculously simple, Gideon told them. He’d spent some time with Stacey that afternoon in the old Lambert Museum office, looking at the way they kept their records. What he found was an ancient sixteen-drawer card file—the kind with curled brass pulls on the drawers—in which there were “object cards” for all the items in the collection. Each three-by-five-inch card consisted of a description of the item and its catalogue number, which was also painted on the object itself. The number 24.I would mean that the item was the first object collected in 1924; 24.500 would be the five-hundredth.

“Sure, that’s a fairly standard system,” Julie said; she had administered two small museums for the Park Service and had kept up her interest in the field. “We use it in the Service.”

“The difference being,” Gideon said, “that yours is on computer. This one’s on handwritten three-by-five cards that have a hole in the bottom for a metal rod that keeps them in place.”

“Fascinating,” Phil remarked to Julie, “and don’t you just bet it’s relevant?”

“It’s relevant, all right,” Gideon said. “All you’d have to do if you wanted to steal something and make it look as if it’d never been there would be to walk away with the object itself, and then stroll over to the card file and pull out the object card. That’s it. There isn’t any other record. And that’s exactly what somebody did. Well, I think so; I’m ninety-nine percent sure.”

Julie smiled as she spooned up the last of her fuul “Only ninety-nine percent? Isn’t that a little tentative for you?”

“Not anymore. I’ve learned my lesson. Considering the way I cleverly determined that a man killed five or so years ago was a four-thousand-year-old scribe, I thought maybe I ought to exercise a little more restraint in my deductions.”

“But there’s a problem,” Phil said. “If you removed the object card, there’d be a gap in the numbering system.”

“Sure, but it wouldn’t matter. There are hundreds of gaps in the numbering system already. Every time they gave something away to another institution the card was just tossed.”

“Mmm,” Phil said doubtfully, concluding the subject for the moment. “Everybody done? Time to move on. We still have four and a half dollars to go.”

After stand-up stops for thick, unflavored yogurt, pickled vegetables, and tahina— sesame paste—with fried bread chips, Phil led them to a koshari shop, a clean, plain, indoor restaurant. At the door they handed over fifty piasters—sixteen cents—and were given deep bowls, which they gave in turn to a bucket-brigade line of servers behind a counter. A layer of pasta was shoveled into the bottom of each bowl, then scoops of lentils, rice, tomato sauce, and fried onions. Another fifty piasters got them each a plateful of pita bread and a plastic bottle of Baraka mineral water.

They found a free end of a wobbly wooden table and joined a group of Egyptian men who paid them no attention but went on steadily and singlemindedly getting koshari into themselves, a few with forks, most with fingers and bread. The three Americans went at it with their forks, but with diminished enthusiasm; it was tasty but this was their fifth stop.

“No, no, no, no,” Phil said pushing lentils around in his bowl, “it couldn’t be as easy as you said. No museum, even in those days, would have been idiotic enough to have a system that easy to fool. There must be some backup, some—”

“Actually, Phil, there are museums that still do it that way,” Julie said. She put down her fork. “There was a case only a few years ago where just the kind of thing Gideon is talking about happened. Somebody stole an Egyptian pectoral from a museum in Philadelphia. They also took the object card. This was in the early 1980s as far as anybody can tell, but it might have been even earlier. The thing is, without the card nobody had any idea it was missing until ten years later, and that was only because it showed up in another museum and it looked sort of familiar to someone.”

“There you are, then,” Gideon said. “It could have been done. I think it was done. The question is: why? According to Haddon, it was a run-of-the-mill piece, not that valuable.”

Phil looked soberly at Julie. “Something tells me he’s been giving this some thought too.”

Gideon smiled. “You know what a composite statue is?

Phil nodded. “Where different parts of it are made from different kinds of stone. The Romans did it.”

“The Egyptians did it too,” Gideon said, “but only in the Amarna Period. Usually, the head—and sometimes the hands and feet—would be one kind of stone, and the body another. As it happens, yellow jasper was one of the kinds used for the heads. As it also happens, although there are a fair number of heads and a fair number of bodies around, complete statues—the right body with the right head—are extremely rare. And extremely valuable… even with run-of-the-mill carving. Get it to the right buyer, and it’d be worth—well, maybe millions. So I was thinking —”

“That there’s a body that goes along with that head,” Phil said, “and somebody knows where it is. Or already has it.”

“Exactly.”

“Or could it be right there in the collection?” Julie suggested.

Gideon shook his head. “No, I went ahead and checked through everything, and there are only two partial bodies, neither of which could possibly go with the head.

“How can you know that?” Phil asked. “You haven’t seen the head.”

“Well, no, but Haddon said it was five inches from the crown to the base of the neck, so applying normal body ratios, and giving a little leeway to Eighteenth Dynasty artisticlicense, I figured that the body, from shoulders down, would be around twenty or twenty-two inches, and there’s nothing close. But then, why should it still be there? It could have been stolen just the way the head was stolen. So the next question is—”

Julie was regarding him skeptically, her head cocked, the flat of her fork against her lip.

“Julie, do I take it you’re not buying this?”