Dead Men's Hearts

“Want to make an offer?” Phil asked.

Gideon brushed the idea aside. “Please, don’t waste my time,” he said, with the closest thing to a sneer he could muster. “This is crap.”

This is fun, he thought.

Both older men started talking angrily at the same time. Phil translated what he could: “Old Kingdom… very rare…”

“What do I want with tools?” Gideon interrupted loudly, well into the swing of it. “What do they think I am, some damned carpenter?”

Fouad flashed an aggrieved look at him, grumbled something that Phil didn’t catch, and went into a huddled conference with his uncle.

“Do you want to buy or not?” Phil translated for them. “They don’t have time to waste either. Make them an offer or go play your games somewhere else. Perhaps you ought to offer something,” he added on his own.

“I haven’t seen anything to make an offer on yet. Don’t they understand my customers are interested in art!” He gestured at the objects on the table. “This looks like a garage sale.”

Apparently Phil came up with an understandable translation. Fouad and Atef went into another huddle. The old man pushed his drooping turban back from his eyes, scratched his nose, and reached judiciously into the basket, hesitating first over one package, then another.

“I don’t have all night,” Gideon said abruptly. “Tell them to lay out what they have.”

This created some protest—it was not the customary way—but in the end, the contents of the basket were laid out over the table. In addition to what had come before, there was a small ivory figurine of a woman, primitively carved and probably Predynastic, a set of miniature copper vessels and utensils, some tiny pots and basins that he took to be cosmetics containers, and a small blue and yellow vase that had been cracked and mended.

Everyone looked at him expectantly, even the prodigiously bored young Jalal. The old man had two cigarettes in his hands again, forgetting for the moment to smoke either one.

Gideon picked up the vase and tried to look as if he knew what he was doing. He scratched it gently with his fingernail, he pursed his lips, he frowned and stroked his jaw, not helping his case any when he encountered the furry thing on his chin and almost jumped out of his chair.

“This vase, where’s it from?” he asked when he settled down again, thinking it sounded like the right kind of question.

Phil listened to their answer. “They don’t tell where they find anything, but they say it’s definitely from the time of Thutmose III.”

“I don’t think so,” Gideon said as if he knew what he was talking about. “I think it’s probably a modern forgery.”

This produced an indignant explosion from Fouad, which Phil translated with fine gusto, slipping into first- person for the full effect.

“ ‘A forgery, you say? A forgery?” “ Phil’s hands sprang ceilingward in emulation of the Arab’s. ” ’How can you say a thing like that? The man who found it, who personally found it where it had lain three thousand years, is my own brother-in-law. Would my brother-in-law lie to me? Would we lie to you?“ ”

Gideon was searching for a firm but politic answer when Jalal spoke his first words in a husky, confident voice. Phil listened soberly.

“He says you’re wrong, these aren’t fakes, but, yes, they’re run-of-the-mill, not high-quality. But he can show you much better things, not the kind of things you carry through the streets in a basket. If their business with you here is satisfactory, maybe he’ll show you some finer things, more interesting things.”

The old man remonstrated shrilly with the boy but was cut off by a sharp response that left him muttering. Gideon realized with surprise that if anybody was in charge, it was Jalal, half Fouad’s age and a quarter Atef’s. The boy continued to speak his piece, looking directly at Gideon.

“He wants to know what you’re interested in,” Phil said.

So. It was time to begin closing in on what they’d come for. Gideon put down the vase. “I have a number of clients who have asked me to look for Amarna Period art for them.”

Jalal smirked. “Everybody wants Amarna art,” Phil translated when he’d spoken.

“Everybody can’t pay what I can pay. I represent some very wealthy clients. And I pay in American dollars. I’m particularly interested in statuary,” he added casually.

Jalal continued to appraise him for several seconds after Phil interpreted, then uttered a few words.

“It’s possible,” Phil translated, “but afterward. First, this.” He lifted an eyebrow toward Gideon. “I, ah, think this might be a propitious time to make an offer.”

Gideon thought so too. He leaned forward to pick up the vase again. “Let’s start with this. I might be able to find someone foolish enough to buy it. Shall we say, oh…”

Oh, what? He was completely in the dark. In this room, with these humble people, it was worth perhaps a fiftieth, maybe only a hundredth, of what it might sell for in the legitimate or pseudo-legitimate art market, but as to what that was, he didn’t have a clue.

He took a stab. “… oh, fifty dollars.”

The two older men went into a whispered conference, sibilant and heated. Fouad excitedly ticked off points on his fingers while his elder emitted streams of smoke, shook his head, and rapped the table. Jalal remained above it all with an apathetic, slack-lipped smile. After a while he looked at his watch—fake gold band, fake Rolex face— got up, and sauntered out, but not before a gangsterly, showy shrug of his left shoulder and another pat of his breast pocket to adjust what Gideon hoped was a fake gun in a fake holster.

It took a few minutes more before the other two came to a conclusion. The old man shoved his turban out of