There are a number of skeletal indicators that appear to offer clues as to the occupation of this individual, and may thus be helpful in his identification.
a. Bilateral osteitis of the ischial tuberosities; that is, an unusually craggy appearance of those portions of the hip bones on which most of one’s weight rests when seated.
b. A laterally bowed fibula; that is, a slight side-to-side “bending” of the fibula, which is the thinner of the two bones in the lower leg.
c. Enlarged ligament-attachment areas on the phalanx (finger bone) and on one of the metacarpals (the bones in the body of the hand), along with evidence of osteo arthritis of the metacarpals.
d. An unusually advanced state of wear on the upper and lower incisors, or front teeth.
Gabra huffed. He knew what an incisor was. He’d known what a fibula was too, or close enough to make no difference. Who did this Oliver think he was dealing with?
This unusual combination of traits resulted in some misinterpretation during my first examination of the skeleton…
Gabra hooted quietly. Leave it to one of these puffed-up scientists to describe a monumental blunder as a ‘misinterpretation’.“
… but further analysis of the individual characteristics has suggested a more plausible explanation.
The roughened areas of the hip bone, as determined earlier, are very probably the result of sitting for long periods on a hard surface. Similarly, the bowed fibula would appear to be a reaction to pressure on the lower leg exerted by years of sitting cross-legged. The roughened areas on the finger bones have been associated in the past with the firm grasping of a relatively thin object in the fingers.
What this object may have been is suggested by a close examination of the worn incisors, which reveals many small front-to-back serrations or indentations in the eroded biting surfaces of the teeth. These have been found to occur in other cases with long-term use of the incisors to hold and snap thread.
Add to this the fact that metacarpals like the one described here have been reliably associated with habitual forceful opposition of the thumb and index finger, and have in fact been referred to in the literature as “seamstress’s fingers”—and a probable conclusion as to occupation seems justified.
In my opinion, the deceased was probably a tailor in life, practicing his trade in the old-fashioned manner, seated on a wide bench or on the ground in the cross-legged “sartorial” posture. I understand that this is a position still used by many Egyptian village tailors.
Gabra’s mind had begun to drift. His eyes continued to move steadily down the lines like a donkey that keeps on trudging along after it has fallen asleep in its traces. But now he blinked, skidded to a halt, and went back to the top of the page. His mouth hung open as he read it for the second time. The burnt-down cigarette, pasted to his lower lip, dangled for a few seconds before he plucked it off and impatiently ground it out in the ashtray.
“A tailor!” he said aloud. Maybe Saleh had given him something interesting after all.
“What?” Asila said without stopping her unsteady, two-fingered typing.
“Asila,” he called over the partition, “do you remember that archaeological theft in the Western Valley a few years ago? At the Horizon House excavation?”
“Where the watchman was killed?” Click. Clack. Click.
“Yes, it’s never been closed, has it?”
“No, it’s still open, but no longer active. Don’t you remember? We were fairly certain that the el-Hamids were in it up to their eyelids, but when it came to proving—”
“Get me the file, will you?”
The typing finally stopped, or he thought it did. It wasn’t an easy thing to tell. “What, now?”
“No, a week from next Thursday.”
She sighed mightily. Her chair creaked. Her copper-dyed hair appeared over the top of the partition, her penciled eyebrows, her mascaraed eyes. “What’s all this excitement, a new lead?”
Saleh extracted the last cigarette from the pack on his desk and threw the crumpled container into the wastepaper basket.
“No,” he said. “An old lead.”
He turned to the remaining two pages of the report, the part entitled “Conclusions and Implications.”
Gabra nodded to himself while he slipped the cellophane off another gold-striped pack of Cleopatras. At one hand lay Oliver’s report, at the other the file that Asila had brought him. The details were coming back now. It had happened four years earlier, in the fall of 1989 at WV-29, an isolated Horizon excavation in the Western Valley. Thieves had raided it during the night. It was not a major site by any means and would not have engendered the formidable investigation it had, if not for the murder of a police constable who was working as night watchman. He had been doped, tied up, and gagged, and when the crew had reported the next morning they had found him dead, choked to death on his own vomit. Probably it had been unintentional, but it was murder all the same. Of a policeman.
What they had taken was a small, Eighteenth Dynasty sandstone sculpture, a headless statuette “in the Amarna style.” It had been found only that afternoon and had not yet been measured or removed from the ground. The thieves had dug it up themselves. Gabra pulled a cigarette from the pack with his lips and flicked his cigarette lighter across its end while he rummaged in the clutter of papers (not all the clerks were as efficient as Asila) for the summary sheet. Ah, here. Signed by Saleh himself.
The investigation to this time leaves little doubt as to the involvement of the el-Hamids, the notorious and hereditary family of tomb-robbers from Nag el-Azab, where for several generations they have maintained a tailoring business as a front for their other activities.
Well, that was pretty much correct, except that the el-Hamids’ tailoring was no front. But that was Saleh for you. The major’s father had been a deputy minister and Saleh had grown up among the clean white villas and
