smelly, and cramped. Passengers did not come down here. Crew members, except for the waiters and stewards, never left.
The space into which they emerged from the stairwell had sacks of rice, or beans, or flour stacked in one corner, clean towels and linens in open boxes in another, and some hammocks and bedclothes thrown carelessly into yet another. Other hammocks, still strung on hooks attached to walls and posts, were being pulled down by excited crew members. It was only with an effort that Gideon recognized one of the young men, in jeans and age- grayed white undershirt, as the smiling, white-jacketed boy who had played the xylophone at dinner.
Phil led him quickly from this dormitory-storage room with its single naked light bulb through a galley that stank of cooking oil and engine exhaust. There was a chef’s sink, two big food lockers on opposite walls, and an enormous 1930s cooking range in the center with all four legs in kerosene-filled tuna cans to keep the roaches at bay. An aproned old man sitting on a stool, apparently annoyed at having his work schedule disrupted, grumbled at them as they went by, a half-inch cigarette stub jiggling on his lip.
The back door of the galley led to a small deck at the stern, where there was a deeply worn butcher-block table at which the kitchen staff chopped everything from sides of beef to bunches of scallions. Here too was where food deliveries were made from shore, and where the crew came for their breaks, to sit on the deck, and talk, and smoke, their backs against the gunwale.
There were two crew members there now, but they weren’t sitting and they weren’t smoking. They stood, frightened and anemic-looking in the mix of light from a single yellow bulb beside the door and a washed-out dawn just cracking the sky over the eastern mountains. Phil said a few words, at which they nodded apprehensively and tried to cram themselves still further into the niche on the other side of the table as far as possible from the figure on the deck.
“Well, there he is,” Phil said unnecessarily.
Haddon lay on his back, spreadeagled across the rough decking, still oozing water from hair and clothes. He’d died with his eyes slightly open, so that tache noire, as the pathologists called it, had already stained the whites to a muddy tobacco-brown. That would have taken a few hours, Gideon knew, and suggested that the thump heard some six hours earlier had indeed been him. And, yes, he’d certainly landed on his head; that was all too clear. Medically speaking, he’d sustained a twelve- or fifteen-centimeter depressed fracture involving both parietals just anterior to lambda. In layman’s terms, a saucer-sized disc of bone-almost the entire crown of skull-had been driven into his head. In effect, there wasn’t any more crown.
Gideon knew this because a good part of the cracked, splintered bone was visible. Haddon’s scalp had split open from the impact, which also must have meant a tremendous and immediate loss of blood-no other surface of the body was so well supplied with blood vessels, and when it was ruptured you could always count on a terrific mess. The massively broken skull had meant more mess, of even a worse sort. But Haddon’s body and clothing were unsullied by blood, or brains, or anything else. Six hours of being hauled along in the wake of a fast-moving cruise ship had taken care of that.
Thank the Lord for small mercies, Gideon thought. He had never claimed to be among the most strong- stomached of forensic scientists, and this was six o’clock in the morning.
He knelt gingerly beside the body and ran his eyes over it. Haddon was wearing the ridiculous, oversized bush jacket he’d had on all day yesterday, still buttoned but rucked up around his chest. If he’d been wearing shoes they were lost to the Nile, as was one of his socks. The combination of death and water had diminished him terribly. Beneath his soaked and clinging clothing he was as scrawny and pathetic as a drenched monkey. Even the proud tuft of beard was plastered down into sodden lumps below an open, gray-lipped mouth.
After a few minutes Gideon sat back on his heels with a sigh.
“Shouldn’t we close his eyes?” Phil asked uneasily. “They’re terrible to look at.”
“I’m not going to touch him,” Gideon said.
Phil looked at him curiously but said nothing.
Some of Gideon’s reluctance was constitutional, an old story. Despite repeated exposure, he had never learned to feel easy around recent, violent death. He leaned back on his haunches and turned his face away from Haddon, up to the soft, thick breath of the Nile for a moment. How was it, he wondered, as he did a lot these days, that he kept finding himself in situations like this? And would he ever get used to them? No, he didn’t want to get used to them. At least he was well past the stage of throwing up, which he’d done into a stainless steel sink in San Francisco’s Hall of Justice on his first or second homicide, admittedly a lot more awful-looking than Haddon was. He’d thrown up, and then rolled up his eyeballs and keeled over onto the tiled floor, plop.
Old Wilkie, the coroner, had been scandalized at the time, but he’d been dining out on the story ever since. Even now, Gideon heard it back every once in a while from somebody who’d newly heard it from Wilkie.
But there was more to his reluctance to handle the body than simple aversion. The striking timing and peculiar conditions of Haddon’s death had never stopped playing on his mind, despite what he’d said to Julie. Over the railing and into the river in the dead of night. If he hadn’t happened to hit the little projecting platform, and if his jacket hadn’t gotten hung up on the little metal post, he’d be many miles behind them by now, at the bottom of the Nile. It would have been days before the gases of decomposition brought him to the surface, and then the current would have kept him headed in the opposite direction, downstream toward Cairo, the Delta, and the Mediterranean.
With all of the refuse floating in the Nile, the chances of ever finding him again would have been slim at best. In the single afternoon of their cruise so far, Gideon had seen a water buffalo and a dog bobbing slowly by, and several big clumps of organic material that he’d chosen not too look at too closely. And if Haddon’s body had gotten caught in or under the choked masses of water hyacinth that appeared now and then, clotted with thick, yeasty froth, no one would ever have seen him again.
But he had hit the platform, and he had gotten hung up on the post, and now he was lying on the deck in plain sight, and there was something about him-about his body-that puzzled Gideon.
He stood up, realizing that full daylight had come. The overhead light had been turned off without his noticing. And the Menshiya was passing under a bridge, pulling toward a sizable city. He walked to the side of the ship and looked down at the waterswept wooden platform about a foot above the river’s surface.
“This is what he was caught on?”
“That’s right,” Phil said.
Gideon examined it closely, not only the surface of the wood but the projecting ends of the steel supports. He looked at the outer surface of the gunwale too, and leaned out to look up along the side of the ship, then down to as much of it as he could see beneath the surface of the water. Then he pulled his head back and stood thinking.
“Phil, do you know who it was that heard that thump last night?”
“Yes, Mahmoud here.” He gestured at one of the two men; a boy, rather, of seventeen or eighteen, who longed transparently to be anyplace in the world other than right there. “The same lucky guy who found him this morning and pulled him out of the water with his friend here.”
“I’d like to ask him a few questions. Could you translate?”
“Of course.” Phil addressed a few friendly words to him, and the boy, in grease-stained, canary-yellow trousers and a sleeveless, faded blue Atlanta Braves sweatshirt, came forward a couple of hesitant steps, trying to smile but not quite managing it.
“I’d like to know exactly what he heard.”
Phil asked, then listened to the answer. “A bump and a splash,” he said. Mahmoud added a few sentences. “Even at the time, his first thought was that somebody had fallen overboard.”
“And he’s positive it came from here?”
Phil’s question received a vigorous nod and a long, excited recitation.
“He says he ran back here and looked for a long time. He had his pole ready to drag someone back in, but he couldn’t see Haddon because he was hooked on the post at the front of the platform, so he was being dragged along underneath it, where there wasn’t a chance of seeing him in the dark.
Besides, it never occurred to him that anything was caught on the ship itself. He was searching the water behind it. The poor kid’s afraid he’s going to lose his job over this.“
“No, he didn’t do anything wrong. We can speak up to the captain for him if need be.”
Mahmoud looked only marginally heartened when this was passed along in Phil’s reassuring fashion.
“When he found him this morning,” Gideon said, “how was Haddon in the water? Face up? Face down? On his
