side?”
“On his side,” Phil said after getting an answer, “with his back against the ship. The epaulet was caught from behind.”
“When he pulled him up onto the deck, did he possibly bump Haddon’s face against anything?”
“If he did, I assure you he’s not going to say so.”
“Probably not, but ask him anyway. Tell him he’s not going to get in any trouble.”
Mahmoud’s answer was earnest and involved, with the other crewman chiming in too. There was much ardent chest-pounding.
“They say they couldn’t have been more careful. They handled him like a baby. They swear on Allah’s name that his head was broken before they ever touched him.”
Gideon almost smiled.
“What’s up, Gideon?” Phil asked. “Why all the questions? Is there a problem?”
“I think so, Phil.”
He got back down on one knee, beside the dead man’s ashen face, to look again at two relatively inconspicuous sets of marks in the skin, one on the prominence of Haddon’s left cheek, the other on the rounded part of his forehead above the half-closed left eye. Compared to the wound at the top of his head, of course, anything would have been relatively inconspicuous, but these really were nothing very striking, nothing very serious. The ones on the cheek were a couple of straight, half-inch-long scratches or indentations, parallel to each other, an inch apart, and offset by about half an inch. The ones on the forehead were similar, but instead of being parallel, the two lines intersected to form a perfect little X. These too were superficial. There had been no bruising, and probably not much bleeding.
“These marks on his face,” Gideon said. “Do you remember seeing them yesterday?”
Phil leaned close to Haddon for a better look. As a man who had put in a lot of time in the back alleys of Cairo and Istanbul, squeamishness wasn’t one of his problems.
“No,” he said, straightening up. “They weren’t there yesterday, not at dinner.”
“So when did he get them?” Gideon asked as he got to his feet. “That’s the problem.”
“Are you serious? The man falls from the upper deck onto his face, cracks open his head, is then dragged alongside a boat for five hours, and you’re wondering why he’s scratched ‘?”
“He didn’t fall onto his face, he fell onto the top of his head.
“All right, he scraped it on the way down, against the side of the ship.”
“They’re not scrapes, they’re clean, sharp impact abrasions-well, I think they are. What you get from being hit straight on.”
“Well, then, why couldn’t he have bumped his head on the railing before he toppled over? He was pretty thoroughly potted, remember.”
“He hit his head on the railing and then fell over it? That’s a little hard to imagine, no matter how potted he was.”
“All right, then, perhaps you’re wrong about his landing strictly on his head. Perhaps he fell in such a way as to strike both his face and… no?”
Gideon was shaking his head. He brought Phil over to the side to look at the small outboard platform.
Phil looked. “What am I supposed to see?”
“What did he hit his face on? What is there to make those parallel lines, that X?”
“Well…” Phil cocked his head and rubbed his hand over his short brown hair. “You know, you’re right,” he said. And where there had been a tolerant skepticism before, there was something else now: a thoughtfulness, a quickening interest.
“I see where it is you’re heading, Gideon. Let me make sure I have it straight. Are you saying that someone killed him? Someone hit him in the face with something, maybe knocked him unconscious? And then threw him overboard? Because of… what? That affair with the statue head? Is that what you’re thinking?”
Yes, it was what he was thinking, it was precisely what he was thinking. But hearing it laid out as baldly as that, he found himself backing off. This wouldn’t be the first time he’d let himself get carried away on ambiguous little forensic clues-on hunches, really. Sometimes there turned out to be something to them; more often there didn’t. “Well, I’m not ready to go as far as that, Phil.” But now he’d gotten Phil going. “Baloney, I know you, Gideon. That’s what you think, all right. And I think you’re right.”
“Not necessarily. How do we know he didn’t hurt his face after dinner last night, two or three hours before he went overboard?” Phil laughed. “Do I have to convince you now?”
“Maybe he walked into his door or something, or slipped in his cabin. It’s possible. He was pretty potted.”
“Good point. Let’s go and check.” Although three inches the shorter of the two, he tried to turn Gideon around by the shoulders and aim him toward the door. Gideon dug in his heels. “What do you mean, check?”
“Let’s go and look at Haddon’s cabin and see what we can find.” He administered an encouraging little shove. “Come on, come on.”
Gideon held his ground. “Phil, you know we can’t do that.”
“Why not? We can get the key from Wahab.” Gideon laughed. Phil’s attitude toward bothersome trivia like rules, regulations, and minor laws was unabashedly pragmatic. Action over talk, that was his motto, with a plan to suit every occasion. In its way it was one of the most appealing things about him, and it was one of the things that made him so successful at what he did, having gotten him and his charges out of tight spots around the world. But it had also gotten him into jams in places where getting into jams wasn’t a good idea. Once he had spent two nights in a Damascus jail because, in an effort to get better treatment for his tour group, he had claimed to be a distant cousin of Hafez Assad. Another time he had pretended to be a drug enforcement agent in Jordan, with similar results.
“Never mind the key,” Gideon said. “Just calm down now. The point is, we’ve got a violent death here, and the police are on their way to investigate it, and one of the things I’m not about to do is go poking around in the victim’s belongings and messing up possible evidence before they even get started.”
Gideon expected an argument but Phil’s wiry shoulders rose in an amiable shrug. “If you say so.”
“Believe me, they’ll spot those marks on his face for themselves. They’ll know what to do.”
“Mm.”
“What does ‘Mm’ mean?”
But the ship had reversed its engines and was shuddering to a halt beside a cracked, concrete-and-rubble mooring dock at the foot of a dusty, awakening city.
“Beautiful downtown Sohag,” Phil said.
They went to the side to watch the sailors throw out and secure the lines-ragged young bystanders on shore lent eager hands-and swing out the gangplank. Two men were waiting to board, one of them erect and natty in a military-style uniform, the other a stooped old man in a decades-old black suit without a tie, holding an ancient, cracked, doctor’s black bag to his chest with both arms.
Once the gangplank was in place, Mr. Wahab came hurrying down to greet them, and a few minutes later the newcomers appeared on the stern deck, with Mr. Wahab flitting anxiously behind them.
“I have the honor,” he sang out nervously from behind the officer’s right shoulder, screwing his eyes to the side in an effort to avoid looking at Haddon’s body, “to present Mr. Hamsa el-Basset, Commanding General of River and Tourist Police, Governate of Sohag.”
Chapter Thirteen
The man was every inch a general: ruggedly handsome, assured, authoritative. A person of consequence. He was meticulously turned out in a simple but perfectly tailored uniform with glossy Sam Browne belt, holstered pistol, and creamy, creaking boots redolent of leather polish. His cap was under his arm, revealing thick, black, oiled hair brushed straight back (with silver-backed military brushes, no doubt) from a face that was narrower at the graying temples than at the muscular, cleanly shaven jaw.
His hopelessly outdone companion, by comparison, looked like Gabby Hayes on a bad morning at the
