Dead Men's Hearts

“Wasn’t there a theft here a few years ago?” It had come blurting out on its own.

TJ stopped, her arm still extended, her finger still pointing at whatever she’d been pointing at.

“Did I miss something? What’s that got to do with anything?”

“I understand it was an Amarna statuette.”

“That’s right. Just the body.” She looked at him quizzically, then took him a few dozen yards to the left, to the neatly excavated remains of a rectangular hut where two Egyptian workmen were protecting the eroded tops of the mud-brick foundations, using paintbrushes to lay on a cementlike goop out of a bucket.

“It came from here,” TJ said. “This was a sculptor’s studio. It was probably something he was working on. The bastards were on it like vultures the very same night we found it. Why? What’s the sudden interest?”

He hesitated. “Oh, I was just thinking about the head that Haddon saw and wondering if the two of them —”

She flung up her hands with a laugh. “Christ, you never give up, do you? Gideon, believe me—truly—there was no head. Haddon was just doing his usual number, trying to cover his poor old rear end. What does it take to satisfy you?”

More than that, he thought, and yet he was marginally reassured. Conceivably, it was as simple as that—that TJ really, sincerely believed that Haddon had never seen the head, that there wasn’t any head to see, that it was first a delusion and then an invention. She hadn’t made a connection between the body and the head because she had never for a moment believed the head existed. It was possible, he supposed. He hoped it was true.

“Come on, I’ll show you the rest of the place,” she said when he didn’t answer, and led him off. She was polite and enthusiastic and Gideon asked intelligent questions, but an edge had come between them again, and he was glad when she looked at her watch, mumbled apologies, and went back to her clipboard and her graduate students.

On his way back to the sorting area he passed the camera crew on its next-to-last day of shooting. They were taping activities at one of the more interesting excavations, a building that had been a well-equipped bakery, and Kermit was arguing sourly with the local site supervisor because the young man wouldn’t let him set up directly on the excavated clay floor. Nearby, restless as a chained bear, Forrest shambled back and forth wearing an oversized Panama hat with a jaunty red band, trying to bite what was left of his nails.

“Hi, Forrest, how’s it going?” Gideon said without thinking.

He should have known better. “Don’t ask,” Forrest mumbled and then told him: Half of yesterday’s taping was going to have to be reshot because some bozo on the ferry had knocked a box of cassettes into the river the previous evening. Cy was being sulky because Kermit had overruled him on a complex shot that Cy had spent an hour setting up, and Kermit was acting sulky because Forrest had overruled him. Patsy wasn’t acting any sulkier than usual but she had diarrhea, which meant they had to stop for ten minutes between every shot while she made a run for the can. The whole thing was coming apart in their faces.

And Haddon had screwed things up beyond redemption, not to speak ill of the goddamned dead, by picking a hell of a time to fall into the Nile. Corners were going to have to be cut, interviews were going to have to be scratched—

“Sounds really tough, Forrest. Um, am I still on at noon?” Hope had stirred. Had the director been hinting that Gideon’s session would have to be dropped?

No such luck. “God, yes,” Forrest said, shocked, “We need you more than ever. What are you supposed to be talking about?”

“Racial composition in ancient Egypt,” Gideon said reluctantly. “We were going to reshoot the session I was doing with Kermit the other—”

“No, screw it,” Forrest said, scanning his wilting and dog-eared shooting schedule and making a few more smudgy pencil marks on it, “we don’t need that, let’s forget that one.”

That was something, anyway.

“How about if instead you do the hour on village life you were going to do tomorrow? That’ll give me tomorrow to—”

“I don’t think so, Forrest. I’m not ready. There were some things I was going to look up in the library.”

Forrest gnawed his two-inch-long, much-gnawed stub of yellow pencil. “I could probably switch you from noon to two o’clock. Would that give you enough time? Kermit will have a fit, but, what the hell, screw Kermit too.”

“You mean you wouldn’t need me at all tomorrow?”

“Right, finish it off today.”

Gideon considered. It would rush him, but it would also mean a day with Julie tomorrow, an entire free day on theirown, the only one they’d had since coming to Egypt and the only one they were going to get.

“You’re on,” he said.

Which was why he and Julie were now climbing into one of the white Horizon vans to be taken to the ferry dock. The driver, a smiling new hire named Gawdat, slid the side door closed with a clunk, ran around to the front, climbed into the driver’s seat, turned the key, and started them up the steeply inclined road.

They drove past the ruined foundations of what everyone said was the set from an old movie, although no one knew its name, then around the base of Monkey’s Spine, the curious, humpbacked knob that loomed over WV-29, and then onto the long escarpment that led to the main road to the Nile. Once on the escarpment, an enormous panorama spread out on their left. They were at the very edge of the great plateau of the Western Desert, riddled with canyons and dropping away, foothill by tawny foothill to the distant Nile, a dull brown band between two narrow strips of green as sharply defined as if they’d been drawn on a map. Beyond the farther strip the desert began its slow climb again, desolate and sterile, and continued far beyond the range of their sight, for almost three thousand terrible miles, the largest desert in the world, across the whole of Libya and Algeria and Morocco…

“I forgot,” Julie said abruptly.