Aaron Elkins – Gideon Oliver 08 – Dead Men’s Hearts
The Egyptian police, he explained, were in a difficult position at the moment. The tourist trade that was so vital to the economy had fallen off since the fundamentalist unrest and especially the attacks on foreigners had begun. As a result, a worried government was putting a lot of pressure on the police to stay on good terms with foreign countries, particularly countries with thousands of tourists who might visit Egypt. Particularly, in other words, the United States.
“I don’t get it,” Gideon said. “They certainly weren’t trying to stay on particularly good terms with me.”
That wasn’t the point, Phil said. From their point of view, it was bad enough to have a prominent American like Clifford Haddon die in an accident on a Nile steamer, but to turn it into a murder investigation was the last thing in the world they wanted.
“And on top of that to find themselves putting some other American on trial?” Phil shook his head while he sucked down iced tea. “To end up having to execute him, perhaps? You can forget that.”
“So what are we supposed to do?” Gideon asked grouchily. “Go with the flow?”
Phil’s thin shoulders lifted in a weary shrug. “I suppose so.”
Phil had had a tough morning too. Unshaven and red-eyed, he looked so thoroughly wilted that Gideon didn’t have the heart to pursue it. Besides, he didn’t have any ideas either.
For the rest of the day an edgy, unsettled moodiness prevailed. The Menshiya left at 11:30 and made its slow way to Abydos, where there was an afternoon’s taping among the dim, appropriately funereal sanctuaries of the Temple of Seti I. Gideon, backed by the splendid, brooding stone pillars of the Inner Hypostyle Hall, talked about the place of the afterlife in the daily lives of the ancient Egyptians, but his mind wasn’t on it and it went poorly. So did the rest of the shooting, despite Forrest’s desperate efforts to pump some energy into it.
Matters weren’t helped by the arrival of a huge bilingual tourist group whose two guides nattered on unrelentingly in English and French and spurred their grumbling charges from one echoing sanctuary to another with the imperious tlik-tlak of hand-clickers. When Forrest finally lost what little patience he had left and screamed at them to be quiet, the frazzled guides screamed back, clicking their clickers in his face. It took two elderly tourist policemen half an hour to settle things down enough for the taping to proceed.
At one point, when Gideon went out into the forecourt to get some fresh air and natural light-and a little quiet-TJ trudged up to him.
“I don’t suppose you’ve seen those stupid ornaments, have you?”
“Huh? What ornaments?”
He had been leaning against the building’s wall, absorbed in looking out at the ramshackle village that sprawled around the temple site. Except for the thatch-roofed tourist compound directly across the dusty street-“Cafeteria Camp. Sandwich hot and cold drink. We sale perfums.”-it looked as if it had been there for millennia, as long as Abydos itself. But it had achieved its remarkably tired and dilapidated look all in this century. He knew because the early photos of Abydos showed the temples sitting all alone in the desert, half-buried in miles of drifting sand. Things aged quickly here.
“Those things Dr. Afifi got out for Arlo. You’re the only one I haven’t asked.”
“No, I haven’t seen them. Why, are they missing?”
“Misplaced, more likely. I called Horizon House from Sohag to check in with Mrs. Ebeid and she told me he called to ask if we happened to take one of the boxes with us. I didn’t even know what she was talking about. Arlo says they never left the room they were laid out in, as far as he knows. He also says they were junk.”
“That’s what I’d say too. You know, a busload of school kids showed up about the time we were leaving. If the boxes were still right there on that table, it could be that one of them walked off with it.”
“Maybe. What would a kid want with stuff like that?”
Gideon shook his head. “What would anybody want with it?”
TJ sighed. “Well, thanks anyway. Hell, if this is the kind of thing the director spends her time on, I’m not so sure I want the damn job.”
They were silent for a few minutes, enjoying the shade of the thick, ancient wall at their back and watching the tour group get herded unwillingly into the Cafeteria Camp across the street.
“Can I say something?” TJ said suddenly. “Forget trying to figure out which one of us killed Haddon.”
Now where had that come from? He’d said nothing to anyone else aboard the ship about those marks, and he was positive that Julie and Phil hadn’t either.
“When did I ever say-”
“It’s all over your face. You’ve been beady-eyeing everybody all day, thinking suspicious thoughts.”
Gideon smiled. That made twice in the last twenty-four hours that he’d been told his face was an open book. He was starting to think there might be something to it.
“It’s not just you,” TJ said as they began to walk along the temple wall. “Hell, it’s only natural. Even I thought about it for a while there. I mean, it was just too weird. He makes all these bizarre statements about that dumb head and his theories and everything, and the next thing you know they find him with his brains bashed out. It’s pretty suspicious. But there’s nothing to it, Gideon.”
“Why isn’t there anything to it?”
“Because,” she said firmly, “there is no head. There never was. He imagined it, that’s all. The story about finding it in the collection later was just his way of saving face; classic Clifford Haddon.”
“Maybe so,” Gideon said.
“Definitely so.” She stopped walking. “Look, the main reason I called Horizon House this morning was to have one of our best grad students go over to the annex and check out the Lambert collection.”
Above them, in the chinks and crevices of a frieze that still had remnants of three-thousand-year-old red and green paint on it, agitated sparrows had begun to dart about and chatter at them. They moved on.
“And there was no yellow jasper head from 1924,” TJ went on. “There were quartzite ones from 1919 and 1920, and some fragments, including yellow jasper ones, from a few different seasons, and most of a limestone head from 1925, I think. Three pretty much complete heads altogether, but none of them from 1924, and none of them yellow jasper. Stacey’s positive.”
“TJ, why would Haddon offer to show us a nonexistent head when we got back? Wouldn’t that make him look like even more of a fool? If he was making it up last night, surely he’d have said it was one of the heads that was there.”
TJ’s smile was almost fond. “Trying to outfigure Clifford Haddon is the world’s quickest way to go bananas. Trust me, I’m speaking from experience.”
“I don’t doubt it, TJ, but the fact that it isn’t there now doesn’t prove it wasn’t there two days ago when he said he saw it.”
“No way, Gideon.” They stood at the head of the long, wide stone steps leading up to the temple mound for a moment, watching the two Arab men who swept it endlessly with endless patience.
“There’s no yellow jasper head in the collection now,” TJ said unequivocally, “and there never was. Stacey checked the records. Lambert was a lousy archaeologist, but he was a careful collector. Every artifact in that collection, every potsherd, got its own number and its own object card with all the pertinent information on it. And there is no record of a yellow jasper Amarna head. In 1924 or any other year. Stacey checked every card in the file, and if she says it isn’t there, it isn’t there. Talk to her yourself when we get back.”
“I believe you,” Gideon said truthfully.
“So there was no reason for anybody to kill him.” She shrugged. “It was an accident, Gideon.”
Strange. El-Basset said there wasn’t any reason to murder Haddon over the head because it was in the collection. TJ said there wasn’t any reason because it wasn’t in the collection. The odd thing was, both of them made sense. Either way, there wasn’t any reason for anyone to kill Haddon.
But somebody had. If not over the head, then over something else.
On the ship that evening dinner was a muted affair. Afterward, as previously arranged, Mr. Wahab showed Death on the Nile in the Isis Lounge, while they continued to sail upriver. It was not quite the hit it might have been twenty-four hours earlier.
On Friday, the long cruise to Dendera for a few more hours’ shooting, with nothing to do but sit on the deck and watch the scenery slip by, began to have its effect. They fell into the rhythm of the Nile, the rhythm of Egypt, where man-made time partitions-this is play time, this is work time, this is rest time-fell away. For the Americans, the only things that shaped their day came from outside themselves, beyond their control: breakfast, teatime,
