him an account of the events in the Western Valley). By the next morning, Gabra had all the pieces: the body, the head, and the box of inlays, the latter two thanks to Kermit Feiffer, who admitted to having been an on-again-off- again smuggling accomplice of Forrest’s over the years, but who expressed dubious shock at hearing that Haddon’s death had not been accidental. After a long session with Gabra and a night in the Luxor jail, Kermit had welcomed the opportunity to produce the objects, to tell everything, and to swear never again to set foot in Egypt, all in exchange for a promise of immunity from prosecution.
Forrest, Gabra confirmed, had been a conduit for the el-Hamids for years. He would offer them a little more than they could get anywhere else in Luxor and then smuggle it out of the country in his equipment cases to sell for ten or twenty times what he’d paid. According to Kermit, four years earlier, when he had been a cameraman on Forrest’s PBS documentary, they had approached the director with the sandstone body recently taken from WV-29, asking what was for them a preposterously high price. Forrest said no.
Ah, they explained, but this particular statuette was from a newly excavated portion of the same ancient sculptor’s studio that a certain Amarna head, now lying forgotten in a drawer at Horizon House, had come seventy years earlier— the now-aged Atef el-Hamid himself had been on Lambert’s dig as a boy-laborer—and they had good reason to believe that the two were parts of a single sculpture. Moreover, there was another branch of the family at the village of el-Till, near the ruined site of Akhetaten, with whom they were in periodic contact. Information from this branch had long ago led them to conclude that the inlays that had been made for this Amarna head were at the Tel el-Amarna Museum, unrecognized and unrecorded, having been excavated long ago from an ancient metalsmith’s studio in Akhetaten.
Surely, they said, a resourceful man such as Forrest, armed with this knowledge, could manage to get his hands on the head and the inlays. When added to the body that they were offering to sell him, he would have an art object of fantastic value, which was why they were asking such an admittedly extravagant price.
Six hundred American dollars.
Forrest was skeptical. They already had the body, didn’t they? If they were so sure about the inlays and the head why hadn’t they themselves stolen them? Why hadn’t they stolen them years ago? They responded with wounded pride. To take something from a museum would be stealing, and the el-Hamids were not thieves. Removing an object from the ground was an entirely different matter, however. Who could claim before God or the law to own what had lain beneath the desert for ten thousand years? But steal from a museum? Never.
Forrest, who also preferred not to sully himself or his staff with stealing if he could pay someone else to take the risks, pressed them to reconsider their convictions. He would pay $800 if they would get him the head as well as the body.
Never, said the el-Hamids, not even for $1,000.
But when he got to $1,200—almost four times the average annual wage—one of the family, Abdul Nasrel- Hamid, made it clear that his own ethics might not be quite as rigid as those of the others, and that he had little love for Horizon House. Moreover, having worked there for a little while, he knew his way around.
An agreement was reached, but when two weeks passed without hearing anything more, Forrest made contact again. He was told that Abdul had unaccountably disappeared, failing to show up after his foray to Horizon House. Forrest assumed they had simply found a better buyer, and accepted the situation with a shrug. That was the way the game was played. The matter was dropped.
Four years later, with Forrest and Kermit back at Horizon House for
Except, as they were shortly to find out, that Haddon had seen the head.
“You know, Gideon,” Julie said, “now that I think about it, there’s one part of this I’ve never gotten straight.”
Gideon smiled. “Only one? Congratulations.”
“Amarna and Luxor are a long way apart—”
“Two hundred miles.”
“So what were the head and body doing in a sculptor’s studio near Luxor—Thebes, it would have been—while the inlays were being made in another studio way up in Akhetaten?”
“Good question,” Gideon said. “I think that’s what kept me from putting it all together for so long. But you have to remember, this was right at the time the capital was being moved. What probably happened is that the stonework was commissioned while they were still in Thebes, and then the finish-work was done in Amarna, after the move. Or maybe the metalsmith was given the job in Thebes and moved to Akhetaten before he finished it.”
The date inscribed on the statue—1350 B.C. by modern reckoning—supported this, being about the time of the capital’s transfer. The statue itself was now known to be that of a noblewoman of Akhenaten’s court named Semet.
“Well, it all worked out for the best,” said Rupert, understandably anxious to impress this point on Gideon, who still bore some of the bruises he’d gotten in the Western Valley. “The Gustafsons,” he added, purring, “are
The Gustafsons weren’t the only ones. Sergeant Gabra had had his picture in newspapers from Novosibirsk to Nova Scotia and had received a commendation from the president of Egypt for retrieving a priceless piece of his country’s patrimony. And, as Gabra had delightedly told Gideon, he’d managed to do it without having to arrest a single American!
The restored statuette of Semet, glowing with refurbished gold, would go to a place of honor in the Cairo Museum. First, however, in gratitude for the part played by the Horizon Foundation, it was to have a brief tour in the United States. At Bruno’s request, the first stop would be the Burke Museum on the campus of his alma mater, the University of Washington.
